


The Genie of Meat Street

by MotherInLore



Series: So, I Guess my Muse wants Marvel, now... [5]
Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, Weetzie Bat Series - Francesca Lia Block
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Canon Divergence - Avengers: Infinity War Part 1 (Movie), Canons are for Confetti, Crossover, Darcy Lewis is Tony Stark's Daughter, F/M, Families of Choice, Ghosts, Hurt/Comfort, Not Beta Read, gratuitous shopping sequence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-22
Updated: 2018-09-02
Packaged: 2019-05-10 06:04:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 22
Words: 35,535
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14731346
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MotherInLore/pseuds/MotherInLore
Summary: Lily "Witch Baby" Bat comes to New York and gets involved with the Avengers and their Auxiliaries.  Or, the Weetzie Bat Crossover nobody asked for that I needed badly all of a sudden.





	1. An Apprentice Ghost Hunter

**Author's Note:**

> For my own indulgence, I'm fudging the _Weetzie Bat_ timelines a little so that Witch Baby can be freshly graduated from college post Chitauri invasion, when Canon Witch Baby was a freshman at Berkeley in 2003. SO, Weetzie waited a little longer to have kids, Max had his _Necklace of Kisses_ tailspin about something other than 9/11, and Witch Baby is in her mid-twenties.

“Now I need to find what I'm looking for,” Lily tells him, and watches the pain flowers bloom in Angel Juan's eyes like they did in hers when he told her the same thing, a year and more ago. Like he thought she'd fall into his arms as quick as she did the last time he ran away and she ran after him. Like he's allowed to change and grow and she isn't. Or maybe she's not being fair, but she's still the Witch Baby; she always bites and scratches when she's afraid people will go away… her mother, her sister, Angel Juan, over and over again. Angel Juan told her, “you are what I was looking for,” like she'd passed some kind of test, like now she can have her panther boy with his white smile that grows whiter in the shadows, now she can have her friend-lover-brother-guardian angel that she rescued like a sleeping prince from Mr. Cake's Place. But Angel Juan has come to her and made all her mad-bat feelings swirl around him, chittering, made her feel beautiful and safe and magic, and then run away again. He's done that three times now, and that's enough. Maybe she still wants him. But maybe it's his turn to pass a test or two. So Lily goes to New York after she graduates from Berkeley, and she does not ask Angel Juan to go with her.

Her family sends keepsakes and talismans with her, packed into the bat-shaped backpack she's had since she was a tiny snarl-haired elf zooming around L.A on cowboy-boot rollerskates: The portrait her birth mother, Vixanne Wigg, painted when Lily was fourteen, with the Frida Kahlo jungle and the black cat and the creepster monkey, is there. It's in a frame ringed with carved roses Angel Juan made for her. She has the globe lamp she and her father pass back and forth when one of them is going through a bad time. Lily hunkers down into the leather jacket she stole from her mostly-real mother, Weetzie, when she went to Berkeley, and then found a note in the pocket later that began, “I know you stole this,” that told her how much Weetzie loved her. This time, Lily's hand in the pocket finds a charm bracelet hung with brittle, jangly skeletons: it's the New York bracelet and Weetzie gave it to her last time Lily came here. The plastic skeletons are more brittle now, and some of them have lost limbs. Someone – probably her mostly-sister Cherokee – has dressed some of them in tiny hats and scraps of bright cloth. They have little ribbon roses blooming behind their ribcages, or silver milagros: hummingbirds, hands, dogs. Dirk and Duck, the practical ones in the family (not that that's saying much), gave her a huge tupperware full of Duck's Thai Spice Peanut Butter Chia Balls, and a long list of contact information for people Dirk knows through his location-scouting job: people who might want Lily's eye and camera for an album cover or a poster, might want Lily's slam-jam drumming in a recording session. (Lily doesn't know if she wants to try drumming for an audience again. The time with the Goat Guys scared her.) If Lily digs in her luggage, she'll probably find other pieces of love from the rest of her family: clothes from Weetzie and Ping, a sage bundle from Coyote, maybe, a thumb drive full of music from Raphael… _I don't have to be any more alone than I want to be,_ she reminds herself. Her drums have their own case to themselves. 

%%%%%%%%%%%

Mr. Mallard and Mr. Meadows greet her at the door of their condo on Meat Street. It hasn't changed at all since the last time Lily was here. Same soft carpets on the floor and gypsy tent drapes on the ceiling and gently tinkling wind chimes. The hallway and the bathroom look older and shabbier. “We’re getting older,” Mr. Meadows shrugs. “And the co-op board is probably waiting for us to settle down more permanently on the Other Side and then they'll probably finish reaming out the building and turning it into teeny tiny lofts for baby bankers.” Mr. Mallard has a cane now, too, like his partner. Half his silver hair has gone and he has a bald forehead speckled like an egg.

Lily doesn't tell them that she walked up to Charlie Bat's old apartment before she came down to them, smelled the new paint and heard the hammers. She sang “Ragg Mopp” to herself as she climbed the stairs, but it hadn't been the same. Everything that's left of Charlie Batt is back in L.A, except for what Lily brought with her.

They tell her their ghost-hunting business is very much in-demand at the moment. Manhattan glows with the spirits of all the hundreds of people who died without seeing it coming: in the falling towers, first, and then the ones who were in the way when the giants chased each other through Harlem (Lily remembers a restaurant with sweet potatoes and buttery grits, and a woman who told her where to find Angel Juan's tree; she hopes they're still there,) and then the ones who died when the sky opened and let through a pod of flying whales. All those people, gone in moments, confused and lost and sometimes angry. All those people still alive, pulling and clutching, trying to hold onto the people they love. “You could work with us, if you like, Lily. We thought you might make a good ghost-hunter the last time you visited.”

“You couldn't possibly be any worse than that Holtzmann creature” Mr. Meadows mutters, and Mr. Mallard shushes him.

“We've seen your photographs,” Mr. Mallard says, "Or, well, I have." Because Mr. Meadows is blind. He gestures at one Lily took years ago that sits on the bookshelf now, of a tree full of fireflies. If you know how to look, you can see the spirits with the glowing eyes, perched in the branches of the tree and laughing. “You have a gift for seeing the things most people miss.”

"If you stay with us," Mr. Meadows says, "We'd ask you to take on some of the cooking and most of the cleaning. It's traditional apprentice work, but also, we're getting too old and creaky."

Lily thinks about this. The truth is, her gift is more specific than that; she sees the things that other people want to look away from. She doesn't know if that will help with the missing loved ones that people half want to see again. The other ghosts, the ones no one wanted to see even when they were alive, she knows she'll be able to see them, but then what? And she mostly needs her camera to do it – the really old one she keeps loaded with black-and-white film is best, because the ghost of her step-grandfather Charlie Bat rode around in it for a while, and that’s the one she used to defeat the creepster ghoulie ghoul that took Angel Juan. Sometimes she can see things with her digital camera too, but it’s harder; like standing in a party and hearing only the words being said to you. But maybe she should give it a try. At least until she finds what she's looking for.

%%%%%%%%%%

_Dear Angel Juan,_

_It's funny, being in New York again. Like, I was only here for a week or so last time, and everything's changed, including me, but there's still a feeling of recognition. Like, the city knows me from before. Last time I was on a quest to find you, but I ended up finding more of me first, just like you did; that's why you came out here, after all, you wanted to write your own music. And I wanted to find you again, because I'd put so much of my heart into you I didn't know how to live without it. I found you in New York, but I found my heart first. You know how my family has a thing about genies and lamps? I'm wondering what kind of genie lives in the Liberty torch. Maybe she gives the same three wishes to everyone: You will be yourself here, You will find your people, You will find new things. But the tricky part is, there's no promises that any of those wishes will make you happy._


	2. Ghosts and Secret Agents

Lily isn't completely sure at first whether they are ghosts, the two faces she sees over and over, in different parts of the city, wearing different clothes and hair, sometimes in places where there shouldn't be people at all. The smooth lanka woman has white skin, and the calm, pretty face of a garden statue, and always looks like she is posing, whatever she is doing. The man is with her sometimes, more often nearby, his squashy, troll-doll face peeking out of a window or over the top of a parapet, or, once, crouching behind a display case in the Egypt Room at the Met. Something tells Lily not to point her camera at them, not to look straight at them, but she looks, out of the corners of her eyes.

Her ghost work takes her in and out of Harlem; Harlem has plenty of its own people for talking to the dead, and for uncovering secrets, too, but there are a lot of ghosts. Lily spends the night with a tired woman who runs a 24-hour daycare for shift workers; she puts eight little kids to bed, and Lily takes a picture of the sleeping bodies and the four shadow kids sitting cross legged on the floor, watching. They knew Ms. Aisha’s was a safe place to go, and when the lizards came out of the sky and Hallie’s dad’s taxi crashed, that was where they went. Lily goes out for a walk and finds another ghost, a trainee medic from the unit that tried to stop the Hulk. “I’ve got a bunch of kids upstairs who need someone to escort them home,” she says as she holds her camera up to her face. “They’re dead, like you. Can you help?” Feena’s mom is deployed; when she sees the wavery shape speckled in camo, she runs up and hugs the ghost soldier and says “thank you,” and the others hurry over too.

Ms. Aisha leans on the door, arms crossed, sees the nightlight warm from blue to yellow and the living kids sigh and breathe easier, and she nods at Lily. “I’ll have your check in the morning,” she says.

Lily celebrates the next morning with a breakfast at Sylvia’s. A woman in a hijab and jeans and a sweater has the lanka ghost’s face, and Lily spots the troll man a moment later, tucked up next to an air conditioning unit on a fire escape. Lily reaches for her camera, puts it down again, runs her fingers through her short fluff of curls, and heads for Central Park. As long as she’s visiting old haunts, maybe she should see if she can find Angel Juan’s tree.

%%%%%%%%%%%%%%

It’s June, not December, and it’s been years. Lily’s not one hundred percent sure she’d know the tree again if she were just looking with her eyes. But she holds up her camera and looks for tree spirits, and she finds the hawk-faced man with the feathery hair, and then the old lady with the wrinkled apple face. Lily wonders if the roses Angel Juan carved into the wood of his tree house are still there, and she does a springy jump at the side of the tree and pulls herself up onto the first branch. The tree house with its rope ladder is gone. She spots one wooden rose, in a flat place where a branch got cut off a long time ago, but first she sees a heavy black boot planted on the knob above it, and the troll-face man, sitting on a branch that looks too thin to hold him and glaring down at her. He doesn’t look like a ghost.

“Shoo!” The man tells her. “This tree’s taken.”

Lily gulps and flinches back a little. “I’ve seen you,” she blurts, “Before. Are you following me?”

The tree troll goes very still, opens his mouth, closes it. He puts a hand to his temple and mutters something too quiet for Lily to hear, and then he looks at Lily. “Where?” he says.

“Around,” Lily shrugs. “In a window on Meat Street. The Egypt Room. Balcony over Sylvia’s. Is the lan- the lady around here somewhere too? I haven’t spotted her yet.”

The tree troll frowns harder. “What did you just start to call her?”

Lily rolls her eyes. “My family has a lot of weird names for things. A lanka is like a thin, model sort of woman with a pretty face who looks like she’s a giraffe moving slowly and taller than everyone even when she isn’t.”

The troll man makes a funny face, like he’s going to smile later, when he’s not busy. “You have a good eye,” he tells her. “We’re not following you, but maybe we should be. What are you doing here?”

Lily hunches and clutches a twig. “Nothing,” she says. “Chasing ghosts. Taking pictures. Missing my boyfriend. He carved that rose you’re kicking, years ago. What are you doing here?”

“Aww.” The tree troll grins suddenly, flips over upside down from the branch he’s sitting on, and plants his feet on the one that’s holding Lily, a little further out. He balances as if it were a square of sidewalk, not a wavy tree limb. “Why don’t you make something up?” he suggests, leaning up against the trunk as if he’s about to touch Lily somehow, chuck her under the chin or hug her. “Maybe I’m a circus performer taking a vacation day. Or a secret agent on a recon mission. Can I see your pictures?”

Angel Juan flirts like this, sometimes. Like the flirting is a bird faking a broken wing, like he’s got egg-secrets just barely not underfoot. Lily doesn’t think the flirting is real, but she laughs anyway. Secret Agent is another one of those words, like duck, or slink, that means something different to anyone in Weetzie’s family than it does to anyone else. “Secret Agent Troll Doll Man,” she says, grinning back. “That makes two.”

“Two?” His lips twitch, then his face goes mock-outraged: “ _Troll Doll?”_

“Two Secret Agents,” Lily says. “My dad used to go by My Secret Agent Lover Man. I think he even had it on his drivers’ license.”

Secret Agent Tree Troll makes a goggle-eyed frog face at her for a couple of seconds and then bursts out laughing and taps his ear again. “Aw, shit,” he says, “Widow, this is the New Yorkest fucking thing ever. I just got made by Witch Baby Wigg Bat."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I figure Clint and Natasha are doing recreational, rather than on-the-clock, sneaking, or they'd be a lot more upset.


	3. More Avengers

Lily stands under Angel Juan’s tree, scowling and tapping her feet and jigging her fingers. She misses her drums. She doesn’t like it when strangers call her Witch Baby – when they think they know her because they saw some of her dad’s movies from when she was tiny, or maybe they heard a Goat Guys song somewhere. As if having heard of Witch Baby Bat, who isn’t even famous enough to show up on Buzzfeed nostalgia quizzes, makes them slinkster-cool when it just means they spent all their time learning facts instead of making something of their own. The movies were dad’s thing, not Lily’s, and the band was Cherokee’s.

But on the other hand, Lily can’t deny that they were hers, too. She was in those movies because she pitched a fit when My Secret tried to keep her out of them. She stole those ancient horns for Angel Juan to help keep the magic flowing through the Goat Guys (until it flowed too strong, too fast. Until her lover nearly went up in smoke and her sister nearly flew away on the wings she’d made.) Even now, being Lily the Ghost Gal in New York, she feels her family’s love warming her toes where they curl like cashew nuts in her boots. She knows Weetzie and the rest of them are there for her now, just like they were back home in the canyons, and when she was clomping around Berkeley with a buzz cut and rings all the way up her ears, like Miss Punk Monk Thing. She knows some of the people who order prints from Ninabrujafoto.com went there because they know Dirk McDonald has an eye, and he says she’s good. It’s not cheating, she reminds herself. Even black sheep can have a herd.

Secret Agent Tree Troll and Widow the Lanka stoop over Lily’s Starkpad, swiping through her photographs and making little creaking and humming noises at each other. The lanka has bright gladiola-orange hair today, in a swinging curtain that hides her garden-nymph face. They seem to have decided the used-to-be Indie Art House not-quite-a-child-star is probably not a spy, or whatever it was that they were afraid of. Agent Tree Troll waves at a man running past them on the path: “Hey, Captain Artistic! Have a look at this kid’s pictures!”

Captain Artistic jogs over and settles in behind Agent Tree Troll and Widow Lanka, peering over the tops of their heads and completely blocking any view Lily has of her own work. She sidles over a little and looks at the three of them looking down, their faces spooky in the light of the Starkpad, even though it’s broad summer daylight. Captain Artistic reminds her a little of Duck, at first: the same sun-bright hair and soft-looking mouth and clean, salt-scrubbed aura. The next moment he doesn’t look at all like Duck, because Duck is a little guy, barely taller than Cherokee, who looks like he’s riding smooth surfer waves like a Malibu Buddha, even when he’s trimming the raspberry canes in the garden at Weetzie’s place and swearing. Captain Artistic is bigger and jerkier – nothing smooth or zen about him. He stops Tree Troll from going on a couple of times until Tree Troll complains. “Why do you always gotta dwell on the depressing ones, Steve?”

Captain Artistic frowns. “Can’t respect an artist who looks away from the hard stuff,” he says, and Lily appreciates that. She looks at raspberry-soda-blue eyes and thinks, _you play the pain game too, don’t you. I bet you have newspaper articles pasted to your walls, and you look at the tsunami memorial sites even though you don’t read Japanese._

All three of them make faces at once at one of the pictures. “Is that Bruce?” Tree Troll demands. He glares up at Lily as if maybe he’s finally found the secret he thought she was hiding. Lily shuffles over to the crowd of them and looks upside-down at the tablet. She recognizes a recent picture that she’s actually kind of proud of; she caught a moment where the real world and the ghost world looked the same.

It was at another nostalgia place for her: the Indian restaurant with the firefly tree, but in the daytime, not at night. In the middle of the frame, an ordinary-looking man in a rumpled sweatshirt dips a samosa into a dish, one handed, his eyes on the book the other hand is holding. Another man stands in the foreground, back to the camera: the flattened perspective makes him look like he’s looming over the samosas man, waving a fist. (In real life he was just getting up to leave, waving his car keys. But the keys don’t show in the picture.) There’s a vague shape beside him, made in real life out of a puddle of curtain and a lens flare and a dog’s wagging tail, but in the black-and-white it looks like a wispy woman, reaching out to the man and flinching away at the same time. Lily tweaked the image just a little bit to make her more obvious. Behind the samosas man, a giant picture of Indra glares out at the standing man and the camera both, looking like he’s ready to step out of the frame and start fighting. 

“Is Bruce the samosas man or the fist one?” Lily asks, but no one answers her. The Lanka says, “She does have an eye.” They swipe past more New York pictures. Lily is very glad she never actually took pictures of Tree Troll or the Widow Lanka, any of the times she saw them. 

“I think that’s strange,” says Captain Steve Artistic, at one of the other pictures.

Lily peers upside-down. “Yeah, it is,” she says. “That house wasn’t there until I picked the camera up.”

Widow Lanka reaches for the tablet and flicks her fingers until the picture is all zoomed in on a single window. There’s a blurry figure in it, with a beaky nose and a sharp, upturned collar. “That’s Strange, all right,” she says. All three strangers look Lily in the face and she thinks, _none of them have brown eyes._ She couldn’t say why it matters; she doesn’t, either, but she looks at a pair of blue eyes and a pair of gray eyes and a pair of hazel green eyes, and she misses Angel Juan more than ever.

“Listen, kid,” says Agent Tree Troll, “when you said you’ve been hunting ghosts….”

%%%%%%

Mr. Mallard and Mr. Meadows have been to Stark Tower before; the money thing doesn’t itch at them the way it does at Lily. Lily is wearing a soft bright dress Ping probably made, with sundress straps and a handkerchief hem, that she did not pack herself and does not feel entirely comfortable in, and Alice-striped tights and her doc martens, which make it a little better even though the tights prickle in the summer heat. She's wearing all her earrings and her jangly plastic skeleton bracelet. New York heat feels fuzzy and thick, like every single air molecule has been worn out by all the people breathing it over and over. Lily’s bare shoulders sweat, then pucker up into goose bumps when they walk into the air conditioned restaurant. She doesn’t quite know why they’re being summoned to lunch with these people. What it was that worried Secret Agent Tree Troll or why lunch will help. Lily thinks maybe there will be lawyers, in smooth dark suits, explaining why she can’t photograph things people don’t want to see. 

Mr. Meadows is excited, though, grinning when Lily asks him along. When she tells him the story of her weird morning, his mouth opens at the word “Widow,” and he laughs outright at “Captain Artistic.” Then Mr. Mallard pulls up an internet picture on his phone and explains. Secret Agent Tree Troll is actually more famous than anyone in the Bat family, he’s with the Avengers who stopped the sky-lizards, and the Avengers are big everywhere right now, but really, really big in New York. Lily shrugs. She grew up in Shangri-L.A, in a Weetzie cocoon of silk flowers and slam-jam music and coconut-milk smoothies, where only she and her dad and their friend Coyote seemed to care about the rest of the world some days. And in Berkeley, people cared about the world, but they made a point of not caring too much about famous New Yorkers or heroes being promoted by the military-industrial complex. Her friend Julie said she was going to write a paper about the ways that the Captain America publicity machine served to normalize the violence of the invasion, so that ordinary people looked at smashed buildings and bleeding kids and a bunch of pretty white people with strange weapons, and felt like they were in a movie instead of a war. Lily wasn’t so sure at the time and she’s less certain now, when she knows a man called Steve looks at black and white photographs and plays the pain game. But none of that explains why any Avengers want to talk to ghost hunters. 

The restaurant is light and cool looking, with sleek metal chairs and gray tablecloths. Lily eats stuffed squash blossoms and lentils and listens to Mr. Mallard talking about ghosts, and watches the other people at the table: these Avenger people. Agent Tree Troll, who everyone else calls Hawkeye like the guy in M.A.S.H, is doing the flirting thing again, drawing Mr. Mallard out into anecdotes and telling stories about superstitions he’s heard from traveling people. Lanka Widow, who says her name is Natasha, eats something that has been wrapped in flaky phyllo dough and oozes when she puts her fork to it. She sits upright, never looks at her plate, never gets any drips or crumbs on her white silk dress. Captain Artistic Steve eats steak and potatoes and listens to the conversation like there will be a quiz later. A beautiful dark man called Sam sits at the other end of the table, smiling a little as if he is a teacher watching children, eating his own steak. Sam reminds Lily of Dirk, somehow, that same patient strength.

There is a noise like a flock of crows flying through the room and two more people come to the table: a woman about Lily’s age with hair in long brown mermaid waves and a big lipstick smile, and behind her, in jeans, a tee shirt, and a suit jacket that’s cleaner than the rest of him, Tony Stark. For the first time at this meal, Lily knows who he is before he introduces himself. Berkeley mostly approved of Tony Stark, Lily remembers, for refusing to make weapons and for working on clean energy and being rude to senators. Berkeley was certain that eventually Tony Stark would stop kicking around with skyscrapers and assassins and come back to California, where he belonged, and be the First President of Cascadia when they seceded. Lily doesn’t know where Berkeley got the idea that Tony Stark had that kind of administrative talent.

“Tony was bored,” says the mermaid, “and we heard that you were talking to magic people so he decided to come annoy you.” She looks at Lily. “Hi,” she says, “I’m Darcy, and I do PR, but don’t hold it against me.”

“Lily,” Lily says, but Tony Stark is staring at her like he’s about to call her Witch Baby.

He doesn’t. His face clears, he grins and points a finger at her. “Vixanne,” he says. “Vixanne Wigg. I bet that’s who you’re related to. I met her at the Jayne Mansfield Fan Club. Weird shit, right? But Vixanne was really something. Tell me you’re not secretly my daughter, are you? ‘Cause I already have one of those.” He jerks his head at Darcy Mermaid. “Or my sister? I mean, I think Vixanne knew Howard but you don’t look old enough to be my sister. You’re not just pretending to be a ghost hunter so we can have some kind of dramatic telenovela revelation thing? Because I’ve gotta tell you: it was bad enough finding out one daughter was going into political science without any psychic tarot shit on top of that.”

“You just say that because you’re bad at people,” Darcy teases. “If you could make people do things you wanted to like you can with computers you would so be into politics.”

Lily chews her food and collects her thoughts. “My dad is Max Loverman, the director,” she tells Tony, “and I’m not sure why I’m here; if it’s the ghost thing or just that I spotted Hawkeye, or if it’s something to do with my photos.”

“I like the photos,” Captain Steve says, “I ordered a print of the one with the lady and the tomatoes.”

“Thanks.”

“It’s because she told Hawkeye he looks like a troll doll,” the Widow says while Darcy Mermaid cackles and silent Sam chokes on a bite of roasted zucchini, “and anyone who gives me that kind of ammunition deserves at least a lunch. And because she spotted both of us. And has a picture of Bruce and his psyche on her tablet. And one of Stephen Strange’s house.”

Tony looks up sharply at this. “They’re not on the Web, are they?”

“Just my tablet,” says Lily. “I disabled the wifi on it when I started using it for ghost work.”

Tony makes grabby hands and Lily sighs.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Yes, I gave Max a last name; I had to reread the series twice to be sure he doesn't have one in canon.


	4. More Magicians

Lily starts to get used to New York. She knows where to buy groceries, where to buy used books, where to go when she needs light and air. Her room in Mallard & Meadows' apartment is even smaller than the one she had at Berkeley, but it's not as if she needs a lot of space. To her relief, the African Dance class she remembers from her last visit still meets on the eighth floor of the building, and the lead drummer knows her. This surprises Lily. She sat in on one class nearly ten years ago and he remembers her. But Fred Za shakes his long dreadlocks and frowns at her like a sphinx. “Little white girl carrying her dead grandfather and drumming like a loa, of course I remember that. Imagining you're invisible is just as bad as imagining you're important. Don't do that.” So now Lily has three teachers for the ghost work: Martin Mallard, Merlin Meadows, and Fred Za. More importantly, she knows people she can drum with. When the noise and the heat and the crowds and the smells start to feel like a hailstorm beating on her skin and her thoughts flutter around like bats, she can drum and drum until she feels the rhythm deeper than the subway tunnels, until all the little hailstone patters are Gene Kelley tap dancing to that deeper beat. The more she drums, the sharper her eyes are, the quicker her fingers on the camera shutters, and the more spirits she sees, and the more spirits listen to her when she talks.

She keeps coming back to the spot in Central Park where she took the photograph of the house that doesn’t show except through the camera lens. Sometimes she sees the house, sometimes not, but she figures it really isn’t her business. But it’s a gathering place for spirits, this little corner, and it’s a good place to practice drumming. A swarm of tiny Lares cuddle up to favorite benches and flowerbeds. Tattered ghosts of playing children fade and blend into each other until some of them coalesce into mischievous Pooks, sending balloons and candy wrappers and grocery lists skittering ahead of chasing feet, or hiding pen caps and chess pieces in shadows, away from questing fingers. Tree spirits dig their toes in the warm earth and stretch and swoon, waiting for a breeze off the river or the sea. Lily drums and watches.

On this day, though, the path to the hidden house appears without Lily trying to see it, and someone is coming down it: a tall, lankster man with a nose like a vulture and a red cape flapping around him like wings. He stalks toward her and stops right in front of Lily and her drums. She swallows, uncomfortable, and stands up. “Hello,” she says.

The vulture man looks down at her, his mouth a thin, tight line. “You are Vixanne’s Witch Baby, are you not?” He sounds irritated.

Lily shrugs. “That’s one way to put it, I guess.”

“What are you doing here?”

“Practicing.”

“Who is your teacher?”

“I have three: Mallard and Meadows for ghost hunting, and Fred Za for drumming.”

The vulture man sighs. “You can do better,” he says.

Lily sets her shoulders and presses her lips together. She has never liked anyone who says this to her: Not the board-stiff high school guidance counselors, not the greaseburger club managers who wanted to get her alone away from the other Goat Guys, not the creepster modeling agents who thought she belonged at the other end of a camera lens.

“Do you even understand what you are?” Says Mr. Vulture man.

He is interrupted by another voice, clear as a flute. A woman is floating next to him, with hair white as shaved ice. Lily does not know where she came from, or when. “Perhaps, my love, you should begin by introducing yourself, and explaining why young miss Bat should attend to you.”

The vulture man’s eyes go sideways, and his mouth twists. He nods briskly to Lily. “Dr. Stephen Strange, Sorcerer Supreme,” he rattles off. “I have been traveling the paths of time and I know that we will need you when the Titan comes. Tell me what you’re doing so far, and Clea and I will see to it that you are at your best.”

Lily shrugs again and tries to think. Neither of her “almost uncles” have mentioned a Sorcerer Supreme. Fred Za may have, but not in any way that gives Lily any context. She repeats what she said before. “I’m learning how to work with ghosts from Mallard and Meadows, and spirit drumming with Fred Za.”

“How did you come to be doing that?” The floating woman – Clea? – asks.

“They invited me,” Lily says. “When I was in high school, I followed my boyfriend to New York for a while, and I stayed with Mallard and Meadows because they knew my almost-grandfather Charlie Bat. There was – a spirit had a hold of Angel Juan, and me, too, a little bit. I… Mr. Meadows thought it might have been a pishtako? Some kind of fear-eater… Anyway, Charlie Bat’s ghost helped me defeat Mr. Cake the demon ghoulie-ghoul, and Mr. Mallard told me I might make a good ghost hunter when I finished school.”

“And was there no magic in your life before that?” Clea asks.

Lily flinches. “We were in a band,” she says reluctantly. “The Goat Guys. My sister and me and our boyfriends. Yes, the same boyfriends. There was magic in the band – too much, at the end. Some of it we made, some of it came to us, some of it … I- I stole. It got… my dad’s friend Coyote helped us get clear of it and give it back.”

“And before that?”

Before that is nothing that Lily can remember.

“Are you certain?” Asks Dr. Strange, and his hands glow.

Lily smells sweet, choking smoke and tastes dry, sticky, rock-candy that cuts her mouth. She remembers voices chanting. “Vixanne,” she croaks. “She used to make spells. For forgetting, mostly - until she stopped later. I stayed with her for a while but Weetzie’s voice came in my dreams and woke me up.”

“Vixanne has never used her power very wisely,” Dr. Strange agrees. “And before that?”

Lily feels wiped blank. “Remember,” says Clea, and her hands glow white. “Remember how you got the globe lamp.”

Clea’s spell is fizzing, wet and sparkling like a bath in Calistoga spring water, like the opposite of Vixanne’s cotton-candy fog. Lily remembers a shop, open late at night and gone as soon as she closed the front door with the lamp in hand, and words spoken by a brown man in curly-toed slippers that meant nothing to her when she was seven, but now… “He talked as if… he thought I was a genie too!”

“And so you are,” Dr. Strange tells her, his voice all exaggerated patience. “A very young one, with fairly limited powers, but you have been granting wishes ever since, have you not?”

Lily starts to shake her head, but more memories bubble up. She’d started as soon as she had the globe lamp, hadn’t she? Or even earlier. All the way up through college, and Julie saying, “you always give the best presents.” Even what Weetzie called her “Black Sheep” self sometimes granted other people’s wishes; seeing the invisible people, saying the things other people couldn’t. “So what do I need to do?” she asks.

Dr. Strange pinches the bridge of his beaky nose. “In terms of training, not very much more than you are already doing, though that may change once we – _if_ we all get through the current crisis. In the meantime, though, maintain your contacts with the Avengers.”

Lily shrugs helplessly. “I had lunch with some of them once. It’s not like I have phone numbers or anything.”

“That will change,” Strange says, confidently. “Simply do not reject their overtures.”

Lily shrugs. “All right,” she says, and Strange nods sharply, and he and Clea turn and head back up the path to the disappearing house. Lily goes back to drumming.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I only know Clea from Marvel 1602, sorry for any OOC-ness here or going forward.
> 
> Also, I am completely misusing the term "pishtako," here; the original pishtaco is a vampire variant with a more colonialist edge than even the usual "vampires are what rich people look like to poor people" trope. (Pedantic commenter is pedantic, even on my own fics. Only fair, right?)


	5. Maintaining Contacts

At first, Lily thinks that Dr. Vulture in his invisible house is simply wrong; the Avengers do not have any use for a ghost-hunter. Tony Stark is the most outspoken in his contempt: he is quite certain that Mallard and Meadows are high-end con men and calls them Flim and Flam. The man called Sam is a little mollified (but only a little) when he learns that both men are also licensed grief counselors. He has several long and exquisitely courteous discussions with them, full of phrases like “privileged frame of reference,” and “coping mechanism,” that lead Sam to the conclusion that there may not any need to investigate Lily’s teachers for fraud, but that doesn’t make them any more useful to the superheros. So Lily thinks they are done with that particular episode, but then Darcy Mermaid decides to take Lily under her wing.

Darcy, it seems, is like Weetzie: she gathers people around herself and pours warmth and light over their heads and takes care of them and never lets them go, and she has decided that Lily needs her. Even without Dr. Strange’s instructions, Lily isn’t sure she’s wrong. Darcy calls and texts and leaves gushing comments on her favorites of the photos that Lily posts online. She shows up and claps and cheers when Fred Za’s drum and dance class performs in public. Mallard and Meadows call her “delightful,” and “a breath of fresh air,” and tend to leave or drop gentle hints that Darcy ought to, any time she stays for more than twenty minutes or so. Darcy picks up on this, though all she says is that she wants Lily to be able to come to Darcy’s rooms at the tower and hang out.

So Lily finds herself signing that stack of NDAs she was afraid was coming after that first lunch: no photography inside the building unless authorized, no discussion of the layouts or security protocols on residential floors, consequences for being found anywhere other than authorized. Badges and escort required anywhere except within personal residences, on and on. Because Darcy likes Lily, but her friends and family like their privacy, too. Since Darcy is dating Captain Artistic and has recently been revealed to be a Stark, Lily is not really surprised.

Tony hovers over all of them the first day Lily comes to the tower, partly because he is still suspicious of Lily’s “psychic tarot shit,” but mostly because he wants to show off. He banters with the elevator (which banters back,) and calls up holographic art from end tables, and waves at little crablike cleaner bots that scuttle along the walls, and rattles off statistics about how much solar power the film that covers the tower windows is able to collect. 

He brags about the people they pass as well: “That’s Matilda Wormwood just got on the elevator. If you had gone into computer science like a sensible person instead of selling magic beans, you would have heard of her. Calvin – the one hiding behind the ficus tree – he’s one of our renaissance minds: designed the ad campaign with the flying socks and has perfected the formula for something that we are absolutely not allowed to call flubber, apparently… here’s Darcy’s door. I expect you’ll mostly just be in her digs, but she’s also kind of taken over the common room up here, so you’ll find Steve the Cradle-robber around one place or the other a lot. Remember no photos and don’t speak unless spoken to. Oh, that’s right; you met him already. Him and Flyboy and the Assassins Who Never Do Anything – don’t tell them I called them that. It’s not actually true; it’s just that I hardly ever see them do anything, and I much prefer to maintain my illusions. If you’re hanging with Darcy you’ll probably run across Teen Witch and Rainbow Connection, too. Oh, and Barnes, because he follows Steve around. Don’t let him spook you, but don’t try to push anything. We think we’ve got all the brainwashing suds rinsed out, but he is still officially the most traumatized person in the tower. Officially. There’s a hat and everything. Well, there was one until Logan stole it… not my point. Point was… Silent Bob will probably not kill you.”

Darcy alternately laughs and cringes at this monologue, and sends her father away. Lily follows her into a warm, cozy space that makes Lily think of California, not so much from the decorations (framed drawings on the turquoise walls, knitted afghan on the big leather couch) as from the fact that the living/dining room could hold at least ten people comfortably, and the bedroom has space not only for a bed, but a drawing table and chair, and a large bookshelf. This does not happen in New York at income levels below Hedge Fund. But then, Darcy is a Stark.

After this, Lily comes to the tower maybe once or twice a week, at Darcy’s invitation. They watch movies or go on baking marathons or have “UFO” (UnFinished Object) evenings, where Darcy knits or makes collage-y things with glitter, and Lily plays with Photoshop or writes songs, or draws. Steve comes to these sometimes, when he’s home. A shy girl called Wanda is usually there, too. She reminds Lily of herself, in Witch-Baby mode, watchful and waiting to be hurt. When the collage materials are out, Wanda pokes through the pictures and sequins and piles of beads as if these things are an alien treasure-trove, wondrous and inexplicable.

There is a ghost with Wanda, most days. He hasn’t talked to Lily yet, or even stopped orbiting around the girl long enough for Lily to see more of him than a bright blur, darting like a dragonfly, quicker to move even than Angel Juan. Sometimes Lily catches a whiff of burnt coffee that she thinks might also belong to the ghost. Just when Lily is wondering if she should mention it, Wanda looks up and smiles at her. “My brother has always protected me,” she says in her furry accent, “and it killed him. But, as you see, it has not stopped him. He could go on, I told him, but I have a ninety-nine percent chance of dying in the next year or two, anyway, so he waits.”

Lily nods and tucks the information away for later, but Darcy protests. “Wanda, honey, no! This is a pessimism-free zone. Remember you’ve got the Avengers on your side now.”

“Some of them,” Wanda shrugs, calm. “I have factored this in. When Hydra had me, I had only an eighty-seven percent chance of dying, because when bad people come into power, Hydra toadies to them and the Avengers fight them.” She spreads her hands. “It is not that I am unhappy to be where I am, I just do not expect it to last.”

Darcy reaches over and squeezes the other girl’s shoulder. “Fight for that one percent, Wanda.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> References to two of my favorite "[blank] works for Stark" fics here: "@ Tilda," by Copperbadge, and "Mad Geniuses and Fluffy Tigers," by Amlago.


	6. Gratuitous Shopping Sequence

Darcy and Wanda come visit Lily at Mallard and Meadows’ place sometimes. Wanda says the soft carpets and the drapes remind her of the gypsy caravan she and her brother lived in when they were very young. Darcy likes the look of Lily’s tiny bedroom, with a few bright pictures posted on top of the newspaper articles that cover the walls, but mostly she gets restless and prowls. She pokes into the steamer trunk that holds most of Lily’s clothes and ~~borrows~~ steals the Ping dress. The bodice stretches around Darcy’s generous chest and goes from being a natural to an empire waist. Darcy looks like a fuschia flower fairy, where Lily in the same dress looked like a stowaway pirate ghost. When the rest of Lily’s wardrobe (three pairs of jeans, two pairs of cargo pants, six tee shirts, four hooded mole-man sweatshirts, one more hoodie in light, rainbow-striped Guatemalan cotton, and the Weezie jacket) is spread out on the bed, Darcy makes a declaration. “I am taking you shopping. At the very least you need some professional ghost-hunter clothes.”

Lily is not entirely comfortable with this declaration, but Darcy presses a hand against her mouth. “Nuh-uh, Lily-billy. Seriously. I only found out that I was a Stark, like, eight months ago. The novelty of being able to just buy shit has not yet worn off. Saturday, OK?”

%%%%%%%%%%%%

To Lily’s relief, they do not go to the places with advertisements in _Vogue._ From her pre-heiress days, Darcy knows the consignment shops featuring designers who might hit it big in ten years, if they are lucky. The stores have the same scent of Woolite and starch that Weetzie’s store does, and Lily is comforted. She is a little thrown when she realizes she has spotted Natasha or Agent Troll Doll or one of two other faces in every single one of the shops they browse through. (Agent Troll Doll makes a very convincing impatient businessman looking for an anniversary gift, but a really fun drag queen.) “Are they letting us see them on purpose?” Lily asks.

Darcy looks around the shop, confused. “Who?” Her phone buzzes and she looks at it, then grins and shows Lily the text. 

**Potato Face:** _Spawn, your new girlfriend’s skill set is creeping me out. Tell me you told her there would be a perimeter._

Darcy grins. “I’m guessing that’s a no on the visibility thing. And Hawkeye also reads lips, bee-tee-dubs.” She shows Lily the reply before she sends it: _Dude, her dad and granddad both made movies. She knows from disguises. Chill._

Lily tries on color-block shift dresses, and long, loose, Eileen Fisher trousers, and a genuine Vionnet from 1928 that is too fragile for her to be comfortable in, and a very good copy from a 1998 production of _The Boyfriend_ that Darcy insists on adding to the pile. She finds a long jacket in bright polyester brocade that Lily can wear only with her jeans, or else it makes her look like the wax swami in a fortune-telling booth. There is a skirt in heavy twill, striped like a train engineer’s overalls, with asymmetrical ruffles and a silk-screened photograph of Lilian Russel appliqued to the apex of the ruffles, in a nest of ribbons and buttons. (“You could totally pull off head-to-toe Summerset Studios,” Darcy insists, “but I won’t make you.”) There is a black leather newsboy cap with a tattoo anchor and mermaid painted onto the top, that Lily loves so much she may never wear her mole-man sweaters with the hood up again. Lily uses her own money to buy four silver rings (one set with a peridot, one with a glass-bead skull, one stamped with a mantra in Sanskrit, one stamped with a chain pattern) and a bracelet that used to be a fork. Silver conducts electricity and magic.

They stop for lunch at a food cart and sit in the car, balancing paper plates of yakisoba on their knees. “Give me a list of things that do not suck,” Darcy commands. She digs in her giant purse and pulls out a flask, pouring a large splash of whatever it is into the bottle of cranberry juice she has been drinking. “And they cannot be, like, TV shows or anything you can buy at Barnes and Noble.”

Lily blinks at the flask. Between Weetzie’s mother, the Goat Guys, and Berkeley, she is well aware that she might not recognize a healthy relationship with alcohol if it hit her on the head and stole her wallet, but Darcy’s abrupt change of mood worries her. Today has been pretty happy, so far. But now Darcy is acting like none of it much matters. “Go on,” Darcy says. “Things that don’t suck.”

Lily slurps yakisoba to give herself time to think. “OK, um. Copper wind chimes. Yakisoba. Ducks.”

 _“Ducks?”_ Darcy giggles, and then winces. “Ow, bit my tongue.”

“I like ducks. Skateboarding. Eucalyptus oil. Singing along to your playlist. Almost anything you can name made out of cornmeal. Those places that let you paint your own pottery and they fire it.”

Darcy’s face lights up for a moment. “Oooh, yes! We so have to get Steve to one of those sometime. And you and Wanda and Bucky and everyone. Make a note.”

“Sure,” says Lily, and a minute later, “what’s got you down all of a sudden?”

“Nothing,” Darcy says, in that way that means, _listen up._ “It’s fine. Pepper is totally right about the therapeutic value of spending Stark money, and it’s not like he actually raised me or anything.”

“What did Tony do now?”

Darcy and her biological dad have a relationship that makes the one Lily has with Vixanne look pretty boring. The issues start with the history between him and her mom, and how he didn’t know she existed until less than a year ago, and they go on to the way she was literally paid to babysit him before they found out how ironic that was, and then the whole Tony-and-Steve-and-Bucky-and-Politics thing, and the ten thousand other things besides. Lily has heard Darcy tell a lot of Tony stories.

 _“Nothing,”_ Darcy insists, “s’fine.”

“What’s fine?”

It doesn’t take long after that. Tony, it seems, has an intern. A high-school student, wide-eyed and infatuated, and apparently some kind of genius. “Kid Cinnamon Roll” has no problem following all the deep science, bleeding edge of physics stuff that Darcy barely gets enough of to put on the right file folders. Things the kid does not do include calling Tony on his bullshit, and all the PR/People Skill things that Darcy excels at that Tony pays other people to think about. In short, though still beloved, Darcy has ceased to be new and shiny.

Darcy crumples up her yakisoba plate. “Well, fuck it. It’s not like my weird sibling feelings are his fault. He only met me a year ago. He doesn’t owe me feelings. C’mon, let’s stop looking for grownup clothes and hit my favorite flea market. They have a tee-shirt stall that you will literally not believe.” 

%%%%%%%%

The tee-shirt stall turns out to be as much fun as advertised. They have to play rock-paper-scissors to decide who gets the red tee-shirt on which a black-and-white Tommy Smothers does baby-in-the-cradle while the letters beneath him say, “I'm in the State of Yo.” Darcy says it reminds her of “Agent ipod thief,” Lily wants it for Raphael. Lily wins and sends it fed-ex to L.A. that very day, before Darcy can steal it back. After that, she has to let Darcy take the one where Kermit the Frog makes his scrunchy frown. The front says, “Me, not crazy?” The back says, “I hired the others!” That one is for Pepper Potts, who will wear it for a photo shoot at _Bust_ Magazine. 

Lily buys an olive-colored shirt with an owl silk-screened on it, and a light gray one with Japanese cherry-blossoms, and a teal blue one with a crow eating a bright poison-red cherry. She gets into a conversation with the woman at the next booth over, about how to persuade the cranky old ghost who haunts one of the framed advertising posters she’s trying to sell to move on. Lily takes a picture of the poster, with someone’s silhouette reflected in the glass at a distance. On Lily’s screen, the silhouette becomes a dapper man in a fedora, leaning over to kiss the cheek of the tobacco-farm girl with the apple cheeks on the poster. “Print and frame that,” Lily says, “and keep it in your shop. He’ll bring you luck.” The stall keeper gives her a sheet-music cover in thanks, showing a genie coming out of a lamp to surprise a clean, shiny girl in pincurls and a bias-cut dress. Lily hangs it on her bedroom wall, over the collage of cut-out newspaper articles.She looks at herself in her new finery in the mirror on the back of the bathroom door and decides she looks like a magic genie time-traveler, carrying little pieces of the past with her, with elegant hidden amulets in the lining of her leather jacket and her flat newsie cap. She thinks, _This is a person I could be._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Somerset Studios is a publishing company associated with Stampington.com, and they are responsible for at least 10% of the glossies you can buy in any American craft store. 25% if you exclude the quilting and the coloring books. I don't know how to describe their aesthetic, but they definitely have one.
> 
> Here is a bracelet that used to be a fork: https://www.pinterest.com/pin/469500329875786374/


	7. An Apprentice Avenger Auxillary

Darcy’s apartment is crowded with the beginning of a party, the theme of which is “fake mustaches.” The why of it all has escaped Lily; it has something to do with a Rocky and Bullwinkle marathon on Cartoon Network, and a gag gift from Hawkeye, and Darcy’s friend Jane being in town. Lily comes early to help stick googly eyes and paper mustaches to the lamps, the clocks, the water glasses and the ketchup bottle, then ducks into Darcy’s bathroom with some spirit gum and some black wool roving, to make herself a long, thin, Salvador Dali mustache. Darcy claps her hands and snaps a picture, then makes another circuit of the room before pulling off the baggy flannel shirt she had on over her party dress, and gluing on her own mustache – a little curly one like Hercule Poirot’s. Her friend Jane turns out to be a tiny, intense woman who talks with her hands a lot; her hair is falling out of a bun held in place with two pencils, and she, too, has a flannel shirt that she has tied around her waist at some point. The shirt underneath says “Astrophysicists Do It with Heavenly Bodies.” Jane had forgotten the bit about mustaches, and Darcy draws a Groucho Marx on her with eyebrow pencil, and then the eyebrows to match.

Several other people come in, all of whom have job titles that end in “ologist” or “engineer,” none of whom Lily can keep straight. A heavyset man with dark hair and a gray fur walrus mustache lumbers into the kitchen area to stir a pot of seven-bean chili and stick loaves of garlic bread in the oven. He is Hal Koenig, he tells Lily, and he works “in security.” Darcy queues up one of the Mario games on her TV and the Ologists settle in on the couch to play or watch. Jane leans on the kitchen island and taps at a Starkpad. Dinner, Darcy informs everyone, is waiting on “three and a half” Avengers, who are out “doing a thing.” Lily curls up in the armchair that sits in the back corner of the room, out of the way of milling feet, pulls up the hood of her rainbow-striped Guatemalan mole-man hoodie, and reads _La Casa de los Espíritus_ on her tablet. 

A ping sounds from the speaker system and Darcy claps her hands and runs to the door, ready to greet the rest of the party. Sam comes in first (Shaft-style handlebar, greasepaint and coffee grounds), followed by Wanda (no mustache at all), and then Steve (toothbrush style, and real, from the looks of it) who swings Darcy up off her feet for a kiss. The last person in is another man, the smallest of the three (not that that means much next to Steve and Sam), and carrying himself to look smaller than that. He, too, is in a hooded mole-man sweatshirt, too warm for the day, and his face is further hidden behind a brown scruff of beard and long strands of hair. Darcy looks at him, her face gone soft and worried, and says, “Hi, Buck.” She chews on her lip and looks uncertainly at Steve, then back at his friend. “I didn’t think,” she says. “Is the whole stupid disguise thing going to be a… thing?”

Hoodie man (“Buck.” His name is Buck) snorts and shakes his head, and Steve makes soothing gestures at Darcy. Darcy shrugs and puts on a smile that threatens to dislodge her mustache. “Well, make yourselves at home. I think you’ve all met everyone at least once?”

Buck scans the room, carefully, assessing each square inch of it. Lily doesn’t know how it happens, but the next moment he is no longer at the door, but instead looms over the armchair, looking down at her. The blue eyes glare. Lily straightens up and unhooks her knees from the chair’s arm, putting her feet back on the floor. She finds she knows the face looking down at her. The coverage of what Hydra did to him, and what he did to so many other people, and the trial, is all pasted on her bedroom wall, next to the article about the opioid epidemic in the Midwest. “Sorry,” she croaks, “Is this your usual seat? I can move.” After a moment she adds, “My name’s Lily.”

One hand comes down on her shoulder, pressing gently. Lily feels the touch of it in a long shiver all the way down her spine to her toes. The blue eyes focus on hers. “Stay,” he says.

%%%%%%%%%%%%%

_Purple. It’s the first thing he notices. Before the Winter Soldier threat assessment (zero-point-five, and he couldn’t quite tell you where the point-five comes from,) before he determines that the long legs draped over the side of the armchair belong to a female, despite the Fu Manchu face fungus, before the routine internal argument between the push to be sociable like Steve wants (and he wants it too, sometimes, sort of) and the push to hold apart as he has been trained, and all the therapy routines for this exact issue, before any of that, he notices that the eyes in this face are unambiguously, intransigently purple. The face is pale and pointy under the dark frizzled hair and the bright hood of the shirt she wears. Pointed chin, thin straight nose, high cheekbones. Might be some Latverian ancestry in there, somwehere. She knows who he is, he thinks, but she sets it aside; the carefulness with which she watches and speaks is endemic to her, not something she does just for him. He realizes he’s been staring when she offers him the armchair, and she goes very still when he puts a hand on her shoulder, but she doesn’t pull away. Her name is Lily, she says. Her eyes are friggin’ PURPLE._

%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%

Lily has been hanging out with Darcy and her friends long enough now that she feels like she can ask for things. She takes over the playlists when she comes to the tower, because the relentless drum machine dance beat of Darcy's favorite songs drives her up the wall. The UFO nights now have music that she likes for the interesting rhythm sections: Motown (she and Sam have a very long talk about Marvin Gaye and why he makes Lily think of Dr. Banner), Squirrel Nut Zippers, Chick Corea, David Matthews, Pink Martini, The Who. She and Bucky make eye contact over which of them gets what Darcy dubs “the introvert chair.” She and Steve talk about lines and shadows and memory, and how they go into pictures. 

“No, I’m serious,” Steve tells her once. “Color theory goes over my head. I didn’t even _see_ color until I came out of that machine for the first time. It was disorienting as hell.”

So Lily pulls up a series of pictures she did for Angel Juan’s cousin’s _quinceañera_ and shows Steve how they change as she flicks them back and forth between color and black and white, how one captures the giddiness of the party and the ruffles and sparkles on the girls’ dresses, how the other makes the textures of the skin stand out, the shapes of eyes and mouths. In one of them, changing the filter changes the central focus of the picture, from the two children dancing awkwardly to the circle of tired, smiling mothers behind them, protecting them and hemming them in.

Lily feels a breath on her neck and then Bucky speaks in a deep, furry voice like a cigarette. “You’d make a helluva sniper, California Lily. You've got the eye and you've got the timing.” 

“It’ll take more than one man to change my name to California Lily,” she mutters, and Steve and Bucky exchange a single glance and then crack up. 

“People have still heard of Ava Gardner?” Steve asks, still chuckling half a minute later.

“At least some of us,” Lily says. She closes out the tab with the _quinceañera_ and pulls up some new ones she took in Central Park instead: A flurry of ducks around a wrinkle-faced dog. A father and son skateboarding side by side, the father’s baggy shirt not quite hiding the holster of the gun he has tucked into the back of his pants. A pale little girl, maybe eight or nine, standing in front of a park bench where a bunch of older kids lean into each other, looking exhausted. The little girl's hands are balled into fists; she looks like a guard dog. 

Bucky reaches over her shoulder to swipe to the next picture: an old man with a big neck and a military haircut, glaring out at the world with the lost look Alzheimer’s patients get. He's holding the arm of a woman who's clearly his daughter. She is pulling away like she's afraid of him, but afraid to show it, and he is clinging to her like she's the only thread through the dark he has. 

There is a hiss from Steve behind Lily’s ear, and then Darcy crowds in to look, too. “Oh, Em, Gee," she squeaks, "Where was that? Are they in town? _Lily_. That’s Ross. You totally caught Thunderbutt Ross with Dementia Face. That’s just… I need to buy that picture from you, Lily. I _need_ to. I am going to give it to, like, three news organizations and some of our moles with right-leaning Facebook pages, and they are going to talk about how their thoughts and prayers are with him and his family, and it is going to be fucking _brilliant._ It’s going to be a better smear campaign than the one he did where he tried to tell everyone Sam was from Kenya. I _love_ you.”

Lily smiles a little cat smile at the flow of Darcy’s words, and says, “I don’t mind selling you another picture.”

Steve makes a troubled-sounding humming noise, but his friend laughs softly.

“On the other hand,” Bucky says, and his other hand makes a whirring noise, “You might actually be more dangerous like this.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I suspect most Weetzieverse people have pretty clear versions of Lily/Witch Baby in their heads already, but if it helps I think of her looking like [Jillian Morgese, ](https://www.imdb.com/name/nm4711616/?ref_=ttfc_fc_cl_t7) except for the hair. And, of course, the eye color.
> 
> The movie reference that's cracking Steve and Bucky up is to _Shanghai Express_ : "It took more than one man to change my name to Shanghai Lili."


	8. A Summons from Strange

Mallard and Meadows are fluttering, in a very refined, dignified way. Mallard stares at his bookshelf, taking reference books out and putting them back again, making notes in his little leather-bound journal. Meadow has the drawer full of amulets open and is taking out the trays one at a time and running his fingers over them, sometimes picking one up and putting it down again. A few floors up, Fred Za and his most advanced apprentices are painting each other’s faces and hanging beads in each other’s hair. Down the street at the corner bodega, the woman everyone calls "Abuelita" makes the rounds among her saints, getting everything in order. They are nervous. The Sorcerer Supreme does not usually summon people like them. The Sorcerer Supreme doesn’t usually talk to people like Lily, either, not at this early stage of her training. But they have been summoned. Lily wears the ruffled skirt with the photograph set in, and the leather jacket, and her skeleton bracelet, and all her silver rings. She sits on the window seat waiting while Mallard and Meadows pace; she knows she is not prepared, but there is nothing else she can do.

The wild little scrap of Central Park where one can sometimes find the path to the Sanctum is crowded today with magicians. Lily, Mallard, and Meadows find just enough room to stand between a woman with silver and turquoise bangles all the way up her arms, and two birch trees. They are nearly settled when the air shimmers and settles down again, and now there is just enough space between the two trees for Fred and his apprentices and Abuelita. The two trees have moved apart and made room for people about six more times before a shining ring of light shows up in the air above everyone’s heads, and Dr. Strange floats out of it.

His deep voice sounds out much more clearly than a PA system would make possible. “Greetings, Magic Workers of Earth,” he says, and Lily wonders how big this meeting is. Are they really in Central Park? Are their groups of gurus in Jakarta and Shamans in Johannesburg and Rishis in Hokkaido, who just had a tall man in a cape step out of the air in front of them? The voice goes on. “I have summoned you here to warn you of a threat that even I cannot defeat alone. Several objects of great power, known as the Infinity Stones, have made their way to our realm, and they are sought in turn by a being known as Thanos, the Mad Titan.”

The crowd around Lily is quiet, blank. Whatever the Titan is, no one in New York has heard enough to react to the name, it seems.

“The Titan,” Strange continues, “is conqueror and a ruler, but above all he is a nihilist. He has, he believes, seen the Lady Death, and is in love with her. In honor of his Lady, he kills, filling planets and solar systems with corpses, leaving only enough survivors to feed his armies. He uses both magical and physical power, both in quantities that exceed the levels of Asgard as they exceed us. I have sought through many possible futures, and in the only one I have found wherein we triumph, all of you are involved. We must prepare. Questions?”

Lily can hear Dr. Strange’s answers, but not the questions themselves. Yes, the Avengers are preparing to fight as well. So are the Fantastic Four, and mutants on both sides of the political divide, and Dr. Doom. The nation of Wakanda has offered their technical expertise. As the meeting goes on, plans start to form among the smaller magicians: systems to signal and warn each other, ceremonies to strengthen the local spirits and implore their help. Names of beings who normally do not like humans much but might, for something like this, be willing to lend some aid. Mallard and Meadows talk to a blonde woman named Sylvia who wears a polyester pantsuit, and to a brunette woman called Abby, who wears jeans and a lab coat, about how they can keep the Great Gates closed to the dead, when there is so much power running wild, how they can keep the dead from stealing it. Lily clears her throat. “Why are we assuming the dead will be on Thanos’ side?”

The silence after that question spreads out a lot further than the original words did. And then there are new plans.

%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%

Lily decides that clearly, this Thanos person is the reason Dr. Strange and Clea told her to stay in touch with the Avengers. And while wearing mustaches and going shopping with Darcy has been fun, she has never tried to talk about Avengers things, or even very much about her own work. Lily bites her tongue, not quite hard enough to hurt, and sends a text.

**Me:** _Dr. Strange just told a whole lot of magicians including me about a big thing coming down, that your BF is also working on?_

**Mermaid:** _Sending a car now._

Sam, not Darcy, meets Lily in the Tower lobby, his face more serious than usual. He leads her down an unfamiliar hall on an unfamiliar floor, stopping at a door labeled _Niels Bohr Conference Room._ The door right next to it says _Justin Hammer Ballroom,_ and Lily does a double-take. Sam smirks. “It’s a janitorial supply closet,” he explains, and ushers Lily into the room beyond, then sits down at the table with her. Theirs are the last two open seats.

Darcy isn’t there, but Tony is, and Steve, and Bucky, and Wanda, and, surprisingly, Hal-Koenig-from-security. Even more surprising, Hal seems to be in charge of the meeting. “We’re here to ask you a few questions,” Hal explains, “and decide whether we need to have you sign another ream of NDAs or not, or talk to… people who are not currently here. You’re not in any kind of trouble.” 

It honestly didn’t occur to Lily that she could be in trouble until that moment. She gives everyone a rundown of the meeting outside the Sanctum, and what she knows about what was decided, and finishes up by saying, “Dr. Strange told me like a month ago that I should be sure and maintain contacts with the Avengers, and I’m guessing this is why. So… now you know what I know.”

Security Hal thanks her politely. There is a silence, Lily shifts in her seat, and then Tony throws up his hands. “This is not news,” he declares. “The Voodoo King already has a direct line of communication with us, and he’s already told us more than we need to know about what his ground troops are up to.”

Security Hal clears his throat. “Pretty sure the Voodoo King is an actual person,” he mutters, “so, careful there, Tony.”

Steve thunks his elbow onto the conference table and crashes his head down into his hands. “It doesn’t make _sense,_ ” he complains, “No offense, Miss Bat, but why would Strange give that instruction to you, specifically, if you don’t have a particular role to play?”

“Perhaps we just haven’t figured out what it is, yet,” Hal soothes. “What exactly do you do, Ms. Bat?”

Lily tries to explain again. Sam puts a hand over Tony’s mouth whenever it looks like he’s going to go too far into a skeptic rant. Steve listens with an extremely neutral expression as if he hasn’t decided whether he believes her or not. Wanda and Security Hal are more matter-of-fact. Sam asks for the story of how Lily got into ghost work. She takes a deep breath and complies.

It has been a long time since Lily told the story of herself and Angel Juan and Mr. Cake to anyone. She told her family, when she got back from that Christmas vacation, and Weetzie had cried and hugged her, and Max had started writing the outline for the movie they eventually called _The Special Spectral Spectacle._ Cherokee had played the ghost-hunter girl in the movie. Witch Baby had been pretty much over wanting to be on a screen by then. Now she tells her new friends the story and watches their faces. Hal and Sam shiver at the image of a room full of mannequins, each with a skeleton inside. Bucky seems to drift in and out of his own complicated thoughts. Steve clenches his jaw and stops listening when Lily tries to explain what Charlie Bat’s ghost did for her besides lead her through Mr. Cake’s lair: “There was a part of me that wanted what Cake wanted: my beautiful Angel all closed up and safe and the same forever, so he could keep me safe too. Charlie and I sort of taught each other how to unclutch.” Bucky looks up at this and glances at Steve. Steve’s hands clench.

Wanda and Security Hal, interestingly, both wear diagnostic faces and ask a lot of questions about when and how Cake appeared and what he was able to do. Cake was not a pishtako, they agree. They are not in agreement as to what he/it was. Wanda’s response to the remark about unclutching is, “That sounds like good practice, now that it is over between the two of you.”

“Between who, me and Angel Juan? That’s not over.”

“It is, though,” Wanda says gently, patting Lily’s shoulder, “You and he have only about a ten-percent chance of getting back together again, and only if you move back to Los Angeles within the year.”

“Oh, that.” Lily tugs at a curl. “Even if we never kiss again, it won’t be over between him and me. Angel Juan was my animus, you know. We’re a part of each other.” And then she has to explain what an animus is, and then Hal and Sam and Lily and Wanda get wrapped in the question what parts of Jungian theory still count as science and which are now folklore.

“We’re getting off track,” Steve says. “Did anyone spot anything in Miss Bat’s story that suggests we should be getting her team training or anything like that?”

“I still don’t buy the ghosts thing,” Tony insists. “Maybe she’s like, some kind of mindreader or empath? Like, there’s no reason either Grandaddy or the Pastry Man couldn’t have been hallucinations. Can she do anything the Scarlet Witch can’t? Because I have not heard it if so.”

“You ever get tested for the X gene?” Hal asks.

Lily, who is feeling more like a Witch Baby with each tick of the clock, shakes her head. “That would be… breaking a trust,” she says. “Like if Kee got tested to see which one of her dads was her actual progenitor. I mean, it shouldn’t matter, because we’re family no matter what. And me maybe being a mutant shouldn’t matter. But asking the question would mean, somehow, that the family Weetzie made wasn’t enough, and neither of us will do that to her.”

“ ‘The family Weetzie made,’” Hal quotes curiously, “is that why you took Bat as your surname, not Loverman, or Wigg?”

Lily laughs sadly. “Pretty much. I love my father dearly but there are some things he just cannot handle, and parenthood is kinda one of them. Max didn’t want me at all at first. He gave my birth mother money for an abortion and then was going to turn me in to CPS when she left me on the doorstep instead. Weetzie was the one who decided to keep me. So I’m a Bat.”

Steve and Sam and Tony all blink a little. Steve rubs his eyes, not even trying to be sneaky about it.

“Does the rest of your family have power?” Wanda asks, softly.

Lily gulps. “Maybe. I mean, people do call Dad’s movies ‘magical,’ sometimes. Kee and I and our boyfriends had a band once…” and then she’s into the whole sorry story of the rise and fall of the Goat Guys. It doesn’t take long, in part because Lily doesn’t want it to. She finds, partway through, that she is speaking directly to Wanda, whose peridot green eyes seem to get bigger and bigger as she talks, until they are all Lily can see.

“I understand,” Wanda says, and Lily feels herself land back in her own body with a thump. “The four of you together, you channeled more power than you could handle. But you are all older now, and you will accomplish more together than apart. Maybe you need the Avengers, Lily, or we need you, but you need your own team, too.”

%%%%%%%%%%%

**From:** LWB@ninabrujafoto.com  
 **To:** CBat@weetzieswear.com; RChongJahLove@Ducksboards.com; AJPerezAndHisGuitar@gmail.com  
 **Subject:** Let’s talk about a Goat Guys Reunion

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm going with Comics!Thanos' motivations here. For one thing, I've got a ghost handler involved, so it fits better. Two, while I more or less expected Marvel to use their big bad to get rid of most of their women and minorities and other interesting characters, making said big bad an environmentalist on top of that was just insulting. I've got the _Onion_ headline all written in my head: **Green Party Candidate Inexplicably Purges Most of Green Party Constituency from Marvel Canon.**
> 
> Lots of Weetzieverse references in the conference room scene; if you're a Marvel person in search of context, feel free to bug me in the comments and I will be happy to give you more footnotes.


	9. The Avengers Need a Ghost Hunter

_They come in the dense, steamy fog of a July night, when Bucky is already feeling out of sorts because the reek of the fog is unfamiliar: the mineral tang of car exhaust instead of heavy, cloying horse dung, less coal and cigarette smoke, but still the same weird bursts of fish from the docks or garbage from Riker’s Island. They follow him out of the fog and into the Tower, into the private spaces, into the gym. They teem: the faces, the bodies, the missions and the handlers and the girls in the Red Room and the boys from the 107th and, and, and… The space is crowded, noisy. They reach for him, they clutch, they keen. One of the voices is Stevie. (Several of the voices are Stevie, different Stevies saying different things.) One of the Stevies is calling his name, insisting, “You’re safe, Bucky. I’m here, we’re in New York, in the gym of Avengers tower….” I know, he wants to say. I know, I know. This is not a flashback, what is happening now. Not a dream. This is not a single memory, flooding in and drowning the world outside his eyes. He knows he is in the gym. He knows what year it is. Hydra doesn’t have him any longer. But he is not safe. He curls himself down to the floor, head between his knees, trying to suck air in around the hands. The rubber-gloved hands with the bite guard, the shaking ones with a rag full of chloroform that will do nothing to the Soldier, the thin, fragile fingers of the girl who will not become a Widow, whose neck he will break. He sucks in air and lets it out again in a desperate rasp. “Get Lil.”_

Lily has never dealt with a haunting quite like this. Possibly this is because Mallard and Meadows have only just started inviting her on the difficult ones, but she doesn’t think so. She thinks this is just weird. For one thing, there are a lot more people than usual involved. For another, most of them are afraid, not of the spirits, but of the man they are targeting. Bucky crouches down on his haunches in the open space by the mirrors in a gym in Stark Tower, rocking back and forth, looking at nothing visible, but Iron Man sits on the vaulting horse, swinging his legs, and Hawkeye the Tree Troll perches on top of the climbing wall, a tranquilizer arrow nocked and ready. Steve hovers between Bucky and the door, clutching his shield and rattling nervous instructions about PTSD in Lily’s direction. He sounds like he’s studying for the final.

Lily feels like she is defending her thesis again. Tony thinks she is a swindler kook, Steve wants her to help his friend and wants more to have been the one to do it himself, Hawkeye is anyone’s guess, Bucky needs her to know what she is doing. And then there are the ghosts. The lights were the cold blue-white of halogen spotlights when Lily walked into the gym. The air is the cold of too much AC. Lily tries to take a deep breath without looking nervous, stands straight and calm in her jeans and her brocade tunic that she pulled on over her crow tee-shirt when the call came in. “I won’t need to touch anyone,” she reassures Steve (and maybe Bucky, it’s hard to tell.) “I’m going to drum for a while. You can use the drumbeat as an anchor, Bucky, and I’m going to use it as a kind of diagnostic. If we’re fighting your ghosts, I want to make sure we’re getting the right ones.”

Lily chooses a spot at the edge of the dance floor, away from all the available exits, and finds a rolled-up mat to sit on. All four men can see her now, and she can see most of the room. She pulls her drums out of their case and goes to work.

The lights grow bluer as she drums, and the air colder. The shapes begin to coalesce. “Holy Hell,” she hears Steve breathe. Iron Man’s voice crackles briskly. “OK, new hypothisis. Marie Laveau here is not actually a con, nor, strictly speaking, deluded. She is a mutant with some sort of mental powers, who is able to pull illusions out of other people’s psyches and create ‘ghosts.’ Her understanding of the phenomenon has been colored by a youth misspent in watching her granddad’s horror movies and her dad’s … stuff, and now we reap the ‘benefit.’ ” The Iron Man armor whirs and squeaks faintly as the man inside it makes finger quotes.

“Yeeeah...” Hawkeye’s voice floats down from his corner, “Seeing dead people versus reading minds… not sure which way Occam’s razor would cut on that one, to be honest.”

Lily needs to concentrate. She can’t stop to give Mallard’s speech on privileged frames of reference right now. There are a lot of spirits here, and not all of them are actually dead people. Mallard and Meadows would not try to take on this many at once. Fred Za taught her a few things, though. She is looking for threads of connection, looking to see if some of these myriad faces are masks, and what is wearing them. _It’s backwards, inside-out,_ a memory of Fred reminds her. _The tricky parts are simple, the simple parts are tricky. Think of giving advice to a friend, or to a stranger you meet on the bus. Think of_ taking _advice._ Lily is older than she used to be, and she is outside this tangle, not in it. It doesn’t take her any time at all to recognize a long, white shape, a narrow jaw with a flexible mouth. She hadn’t realized, when she was fourteen, how much her demon ghoulie-ghoul resembled David Bowie. “I know you,” she says, quietly, “Are you still calling yourself Cake?”

To Lily, it seems that more than half the ghosts in the room take on the matte plastic texture of department-store mannequins. She sees Cake pulling strings that strobe back and forth between light and shadow, making the puppets dance. “Now, now, Witch Baby,” Cake tells her, “I’m not here for you.” He smiles gently and waves his elegant fingers. The ghost puppets spiral around Bucky, who hugs his knees and rocks. “You all want him safe, don’t you? Safe and sound, where nobody else can get him? Safe inside and out, with no monsters hiding behind his eyes? It’s a really a very simple procedure.”

Lily narrows her eyes. Cake isn’t here for her, and that means she can’t quite fight him off. She can only guide, the way Charlie Bat guided her the last time. She stops tracking the puppet strings and starts looking to see who is feeding the creature. There are three red lines: from Tony, Steve, and Bucky, all three of them afraid of the same thing now, and each of them longing for something that’s gone. “You all have your own magic,” she calls out to them, and oh, that feels like a stupid thing to say in a place where even the gym is full of computers, but it has to be said. “Look at him from your place of power.”

“So beautiful,” Cake croons, “such a lovely soul in that pretty face. I can make sure it never turns old and ugly. It's such a shame when people don't take care of beautiful things.”

Steve makes a strangled noise and makes a half-gesture of reaching toward his friend, but Cake and the ghosts are between them. “He looks like a hydra,” Steve rasps at Lily, “Like each ghost is a head on a neck coming from the… the...”

Cake lowers white lids halfway down over his albino pink eyes. “Do you want me to kill the monster for you? The one you're all so afraid of? I don't like it when people are afraid.”

“Stare him down,” Lily warns the three men. “See him as clearly as you can.”

Cake sidles closer in to where Bucky crouches, runs one white finger under a lock of hair and tucks it behind Bucky's ear. “Or do you still need the monster? Do you need him to be strong?”

“He… Bucky...” Steve can't look at Cake and can't look at Bucky, either. His hands shake and his eyes are flinching closed. “Bucky's … already…”

Tony's faceplate snaps up and he sneers from out of the Iron Man armor. “Yeah,” he says, “we're not doing that one anymore. I've been down that road a few times and it has ended badly every time, and we've got bigger fish to fry. Sorry to disappoint you, Baker Man.” 

The red line between Tony and Cake snaps, leaving the ghoul stretched and wobbling between the two older-younger men. Cake acts like he didn't notice at all. “You want to know where he is? Keep him with you always?” he purrs.

There's a sharp whistle from the top of the climbing wall. “Hey, Lefty!” Hawkeye's flat, nasal voice cuts across Cake's silken tones like a sawblade. “Catch!”

Bucky's metal hand unfolds from around his knees and picks the rifle scope out of the air, seemingly without Bucky looking at it. Slowly, so slowly, while Lily drums heartbeats and rivers and roots, Bucky stumbles up to his feet, then takes the scope in his flesh hand and raises it to one eye. He squints. His spine straightens and he peers at Cake through the scope like a steampunk aristocrat with a monocle. “Heh.” It sounds like a cough, or the start of a laugh. “You're afraid of fuckin' everything, ain't you, pipsqueak? You're afraid of time!” His feed line to the demon doesn't snap, but fades away to nothing, or almost nothing. It is only Steve caught, now. Half the ghosts in the room are gone, too. There are still plenty left: some that burn, some that weep, many, so many, that bleed.

Steve looks across and through the swarm of ghosts at his friend, and then at Cake. “Bucky,” he says, and his voice no longer shakes, “Bucky can decide what he is without you.”

“Hm.” Cake sinks through the floor of the gym, taking the puppet ghosts with him. Lily can still make out a line pulling at Steve, but it's a lot weaker than it was. None of the remaining spirits seem to be tied to Cake at all. Lily drums and looks for threads and connections; do any of the other spirits need her to do anything?

None of the ghosts that circle around Bucky now are attacking. A little girl with potbelly and a round moon-face with a bullet hole just above the right ear tugs at Bucky’s sleeve, or tries to. Her fingers go through. _Odpouštím ti,_ she whispers, and Bucky‘s head and shoulders droop, and she is gone, taking the other wraiths with her. Bucky takes a rasping breath that sounds like a sob.

The lights are still icy blue. Lily drums. Steve makes a frustrated noise. “There’s _more?”_

Lily lets her hands go still and looks up. “You guys have a lot of ghosts,” she says matter-of-factly, “You _share_ a lot of ghosts.” She stands up, her knees popping, and sets the drums aside in favor of the old-fashioned camera hanging around her neck. A beam shoots from the lens to the gym mirrors, and a man appears in the reflection: a small, dapper man with a pencil mustache, his face and hair have the too-pink tinge of old Kodachrome film. The busted sandbag in the back corner of the gym shows through the gray cloth of his suit.

“This is just insulting.” The ghost of Howard Stark declares. “I should not be here. I’m a man of science.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Odpouštím ti: Czech, "I forgive you."


	10. Howard

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, Howard's going to use one period-typical slur, here. He isn't aware that it is one.

Everyone goes quiet, staring. Lily takes a deep breath. “According to your son, it is also possible that you are a collective hallucination that I’m creating from mutant psi powers that are manifesting in ways I was conditioned to expect from watching old horror movies; that I’m pulling you out of everyone’s memories and projecting you on the mirror.”

“And you don't know which? You ought to design some experiments,” Howard says testily.

Tony’s voice croaks. “Friday,” he says, “Are you recording this?”

“Of course, sir.”

“And are your feeds picking up anything from the mirror other than the usual, or are we all talking to something that’s not there, like assholes?”

“There is one gentleman who appears in the mirror but not the room, sir. His facial features bear a 99% correlation with archival footage of Mr. Howard Stark.”

“Well,” Tony sighs, “That’s one data point.”

“I’ve missed you, Howard,” says Steve, and the ghost’s face lights up. Literally. Little beams dance around his head.

“Rogers! You made it out! I knew you had to be alive out there somewhere!”

Tony’s face shuts down hard. “Even now,” he grates, “even now, he’s the one that’s important to you.”

Howard snorts dismissively. “I know _you’re_ doing fine,” he says. “New science all the time and you do right by your family. I didn’t know about Rogers. Or…” Howard leans out from the mirror, craning his neck. “Is that Barnes? Hey, Sarge, is that you?”

Bucky runs his flesh hand over his cheeks, hard, and looks up. “More or less,” he says. “They tell me I killed you. I don’t remember it very well, but I’m sorry.”

Howard shrugs. “Only luck you finished the job before my liver did. Or Maria, I suppose. And it’s not like I don’t have a body count of my own.”

“And are you sorry about yours?” Tony growls, and the ghost looks confused. “What about the lives you ruined because you were so busy not giving up on the captain, eh? Are you sorry about them? Or the people who died because you didn't keep an eye on Obie?”

Steve is talking over him, pleading for a forgiveness that Lily thinks Howard already gave. “Bucky didn’t know what he was doing, Howard, he was-”

Lily is starting to wonder if Bucky’s ghosts are the worst in the tower. There’s a snorting noise from Tree Troll’s perch, and Hawkeye mutters, loud enough for Lily to hear, “Boys, behave or I’ll turn this séance right around….”

“How many people do you get to sacrifice for your special project?” Tony demands. “When does sticking with your buddy let you ignore all the rest of the world?”

“Captured and experimented on and...” Steve spouts,

“Steve,” Bucky says. Neither Steve nor Tony seems to hear him. Hawkeye shifts his grip just a little, keeping the tranq arrow aimed squarely at Bucky as he moves, but not firing.

“….tortured and brainwashed,” Steve goes on, “and I’m all he’s got left in this time, Howard,”

“STEVE!” There’s a blur and a thud, and Steve is lying flat on his back on the gym floor. Bucky stands over him, breathing hard, one foot planted on Steve’s chest. His eyes flick sideways at Hawkeye in his perch. “Shut yer trap, punk.”

“Bucky,” Steve starts to reach up with one hand and Bucky puts a little more weight on the foot that rests on his friend’s chest. “Shut it. I beat Hydra, Stevie.”

“Yeah,” says Steve, “you did. That’s what-”

“I beat them,” Bucky repeats. “Every goddamn thing they shoved in my head, every weapon they put in my hands, I turned against them. I took it all back and made it mine.”

“I know, Buck...”

“I went back into goddamn _cryo_ even to get my head fixed the same way it got broken. I took back _everything.”_

“I know,” Steve says again.

“So YOU,” Bucky roars, “Do not get to dwell on that shit. You do not get to turn that victory into a defeat for the sake of your - goddamn – _feelings!”_ He emphasizes the last three words with three taps of his foot on Steve's chest, then pivots and starts out the door. “So stow your fuckin’ gab." 

Hawkeye whistles. “Attaboy, Barnes,” he calls. Lily looks at the thread leading from Steve down into the floor to where Cake disappeared. She watches it fade, then break, waving like a loose strand of spiderweb.

Howard’s ghost rolls his eyes. “Well, Cap, your nose isn't broken, so he must have mellowed a bit over the years…”

Steve laughs, shakily. “I'll break _your_ nose for you, asshole. Or, y'know, I would if I could.”

Howard waves this off. “But we were about to investigate the parameters of my current existence. I really hope I'm not part of some bullshit psychotherapy thing. I raised you to be stronger than that, Anthony.”

Tony's face has gone tight and hard under the shadow of the raised faceplate. He mutters something under his breath, and then gives his most elaborate shrug. “The guy I thought was the patient here just stormed out, and you're still here, so… I dunno, do you feel like a hallucination?”

“I feel like me,” Howard says, “Only, you know, dead. But who says hallucinations can't have feelings?”

“Oh, fuck, leave the Solaris problem out of it, Dad.”

Steve, whose eyes have been flickering back and forth between Howard's ghost and the door where Bucky left, looks at Tony. “Solaris?”

“Add it to your list,” Tony says impatiently. “There's a book and a movie. They're both better if you get stoned first, but, well, you can't.” He hops down from the vaulting horse, pacing around the gym, thinking, always circling back to Howard. “What kind of data points are you looking for? What would support one theory over the other?”

“We're not there yet,” says the ghost. “Let's start with the basics. Apparently, I can be recorded, which is already more than those gyps who advertise in the back pages of the News can offer.”

“OK,” Tony says, “and you leaned out of the mirror to get a look at Barnes. Can you actually leave it?”

Howard takes a step forward and vanishes. A blurry blue light floats in the air, circling Steve's head, whipping itself faster and faster around the rim of the shield and shooting off in an arc to inspect the Iron Man armor, then drifting back to the mirror. Howard reappears, looking droopy. Little black pops and streaks judder across his suit like a the last few frames in a movie reel, and his voice crackles with static. “Don't make me do that again,” he says.

“Mmmmkay.” Tony's voice has gone down to the soft mutter that means he has forgotten the rest of the room and is deep in data-space. “I wonder if Foster's unobtainiograph would pick up anything from you. And if it would actually be possible to borrow it without facing certain death by duct tape. How long can you stay?”

“That would be another point to test, wouldn't it?”

Steve scratches his head, feeling lost. “Do we need to get into it right now, though? I think Howard is real enough to be going on with. Remember Miss Bat's briefing, Tony. There's a whole bunch of people all over the world who are planning to summon a whole lot of ghosts like Howard to help Dr. Strange when Thanos comes. So however it works, one of our best allies can vouch for it working.”

“Means nothing,” Tony responds automatically. “Maybe Strange knows how to make crazy into an energy source and is organizing a gathering of crazies into a giant crazy battery. In which case, you'd think he'd just hook himself up to the offices of the Daily Bugle, but whatever.”

“Aw for crissake will you _quit_ it already!” Barton whines from his perch overhead. “I have not had to listen to this amount of philosophical horse hockey since I was undercover as a drug buyer in Tijuana.” 

“What or who is Thanos?” asks Howard.

Tony shrugs again. “Giant asshole from Space, wants to kill everyone, has to make a pit stop on Earth and pick up a couple things first.” 

“Oh,” says Howard. “Well, I'm in. If I keep existing after I leave this room I'll see if I can scare anyone else up, too.”

“Is that… why you came here tonight?” Steve asks.

Howard rolls his eyes. “Hell if I know. Up to a couple minutes ago it looked like you were dealing with people stuff. I was always shit at people stuff. No reason to summon me.”

“We’re not trying to keep you,” Tony snaps.

“Someone is.” Howard spreads his hands. “No idea why; you’ve gone beyond me with most of your tech, and you treat your people better, too.”

“What?” Tony and Steve say it together.

“Anthony, when things go wrong with your girl, you try to make it right, don’t you? You don’t just take another drink and tell her to stop whining.”

“Do you mean Pepper, or Darcy?” Tony flexes his fingers a little.

“Either.”

“Well,” Tony says, “yeah. I mean, after I hide out for a while and try to bribe them with shopping trips and things, but, y’know.” He stops pacing abruptly. “Darcy. Oh, shit. I haven't talked to Darcy about anything but work since… shit. Friday, make a note. When I ask for tomorrow's to do list, put “talk to your daughter, dumbass” on the top of it and don't show me anything else until I've taken care of it.”

“See? You’re a better man than I was,” Howard concludes firmly.

Steve looks bewildered and tired. Tony blinks a few times and swallows hard. “That...” He speaks back over his shoulder into the pile of mats where Lily set up her drums “I’ll give you this much, Miss Cleo. These hallucinations you pull up tell some of the best lies… Cleo? Lily?” His gaze flickers around the gym. “Where’d she go?”

“She took off about the time Barnes did,” Clint advises from his loft. “She was texting with someone as she went.”

“Seriously? And we didn't notice?”

Steve’s head snaps up. “Bucky! Friday, where’s Bucky? What’s he doing? Is he alright?”

“Sgt. Barnes is currently in the Fermat Multipurpose room,” Friday advises them, “And he appears to be doing the Lindy Hop.”

Howard’s ghost doubles over laughing, then laughs some more, collapses to the reflected floor, and drops out of sight.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Yes, Bucky is paraphrasing Mark Vorkosigan's kickass rant from the end of _Mirror Dance._ Always steal from the best.
> 
> Honestly, though, why are there not more Avengers/Vorkosiverse crossovers, or even fics where members of the former read the the latter? You can't tell me Steve wouldn't grok Miles on a deep and personal level...


	11. Midnight Waltz

Mr. Meadows is the one who taught Lily that it’s all right to take breaks while you’re working, when the voices and the lights and the strangers’ emotions get to be too much. And unlike Mr. Cake, Howard isn’t likely to hurt anyone. Lily’s not 100% clear on who Howard is there for. Lily is, she thinks, here for Bucky, which makes the other two men not her problem right now. She slips out of the gym and pulls out her phone.

**Me:** _Darcy, are you still awake?_

**Mermaid:** _Duh, chica, what’s up?_

**Me:** _You know they called me in to help w/Sgt?_

**Mermaid:** _He OK?_

**Me:** _Think so. But your Dad and BF came into the gym & r not OK._

**Mermaid:** _[poop emoji]! Are they dick waving AGAIN?_

**Mermaid:** _On my way down. You can crash at mine if you need rest, OK?_

**Me:** _Thanks_.

The big common room on Darcy’s floor has windows into the hallway as well as outside, and Lily can spot a shape through it: coiled spine, hands spread at hip height, ready to pull a weapon or throw a punch. Lily knocks on the window and then stands by the doorway. “You’re safe here, Bucky,” she says from the doorway. “This is Avengers Tower, in New York. Steve is--”

Bucky cuts her off. “Yeah, yeah. I ain’t dotting out. I’m just...” The metal fingers clench around the back of a chair. “I’m kinda pissed off right now,” he says, in a light, careless voice like it doesn’t matter. _When was the last time he got a chance to just be angry,_ Lily wonders. _If he’s here because of Steve’s influence, how dangerous would it feel to be angry at Steve?_

“I thought Steve and Tony were pretty clutch,” Lily agrees. “How did you having a bad day turn into being all about them so fast?”

“Yeah,” Bucky says, his hand unclenching just a little. There are four finger-shaped holes in the fabric of the cushion he was grabbing. “They… they do that. Clutch. Both of them.”

“So you’re mad,” says Lily. “Do you want to move, or stay still?”

Bucky scowls at her, his eyebrows looking fierce but his mouth gone soft with confusion under his beard. “What?”

“When I fought with my sister, growing up,” Lily says, “Afterward I’d lock myself up in the garden shed where I kept my drum set and play until my shoulders hurt. And Kee took a hot bath with lavender oil and listened to harp music. Which one are you?”

“Oh.” There is a silence. “The first one. For now. ‘S why I was in the gym when...”

“OK.” Lily thinks. “Are there other gyms? Or a pool? Or you could run up and down stairs?”

“Not that I have access to, I got too much metal in me to swim, and I could, but.” The metal fingers go back into the pillow holes. “I need… stairs won’t help my brain.”

“You need to think and move,” Lily says, summarizing. “Wanna dance?”

“Dance?” Bucky’s eyes and shoulders sag a little in his confusion. They match his mouth, now.

“I mean,” Lily says, “you don’t have to. But.”

_But you can dance without talking. But you can be as fancy or as simple as you want, and think about where you’re putting your feet instead of how many ghosts are following you. But you can pick the music that says what your voice won’t let you. But dancing belonged to Sgt. Barnes, not the Soldier, and if you have to choose between being two ghosts because you’re not quite up to being a live person…_

Bucky rubs his hand over his face, his neck drooping tired. He looks up and around the common room. “Here?”

“We could move those little tables,” Lily agrees. There are a lot of lab people and tinkerers on this floor. This wouldn’t even be the first time this _week_ that half the furniture ended up on top of the kitchen island. Bucky heaves up tables and chairs so fast he might as well be juggling them. Lily edges into the room and along the edge of the wall on the carpeted side, away from airborne furniture. She pulls out her phone and pokes at it until the playlist titled “Brandy-Lynn” comes up. Brandy-Lynn loved to dance. “Friday,” Lily says, “can you play this with a fifteen-second pause between each song?”

“Certainly, Ms. Bat,” the room says. Even Lily’s gifts don’t allow her to see Friday. “The docking port is on the shelf to the immediate right of the television.” So Lily takes care of that, while the last of the chairs and tables are banished from the uncarpeted half of the common room.

Bucky stands – not at attention, but with attention – in the center of the cleared space. He reaches his arms out just a little. “We doin’ this?” Lily steps forward to meet him.

They don’t hang on to each other tightly. They keep their elbows bent and arms loose. Bucky’s right hand rests on Lily’s waist as if it were the back of a chair, and Lily treats his arms the same way. Her right hand holds his metal one; he curves the fingers but doesn’t close them. Friday starts the music.

They spend “Flat Foot Floogie” and “Ragg Mopp” working out the differences between the kind of swing dance Lily learned for one of Max’s movies and the kind Bucky knows.

They spend “Big Fat Mama,” and “Wine Spodiodi” dancing a very competent and utilitarian box step with occasional spins. Lily taps drum solos on Bucky’s metal hand with her fingers.

“Hound Dog” becomes a flying, slam-jam Lindy-hip-hop game. Bucky spins Lily halfway around so they’re dancing side by side, and the box step becomes a skipping double-time time step. Lily can hear the song their feet would make if their shoes had taps on them. He spins her back to normal and then leapfrogs over her head as if she were still ten years old and four-foot eight instead of being twenty-four and a foot taller. Their feet still move in perfect sync as he bounces back to her, grinning.

Steve and Darcy come upon them a few songs later and watch from the door as they circle the room in a rapid waltz while a slow aching voice sings about trying to be a good girl. Lily and Bucky still do not hold each other tightly, or look at each other. Their faces are both slack and tired; the game has gone back to being an exercise. Watching them, Steve’s face flickers with kaleidoscope emotions: nostalgia, guilt, hope. 

Darcy’s thoughts are simpler. “ _Counting Crows?_ Seriously? That is possibly the least appropriate waltz to actually dance to in the history of ever.”

“I wasn’t gonna say anything,” Bucky calls over Lily’s shoulder as they glide past. 

They stop when Marjorie finishes dreaming of horses, and Lily tells Friday to pause the music and comes over to the doorway where Darcy and Steve hover. “This playlist was from my grandmother’s wake,” she explains, “so some of the songs are for … dealing.”

Bucky considers the lyrics of their inappropriate waltz. “She do it to herself?” he asks, and Steve flinches.

“Not that way,” Lily says. “She was a lush, though. Basically dived into a martini glass when my mom was thirteen and never came up again. Weetzie took care of her then and now she takes care of everyone.”

“And you were dancing now, why?” Darcy doesn’t sound accusing, just curious.

Lily shrugs. “I read a thing once. About exercise and neurotransmitters. And the gym was full.” 

Steve flinches again, but Bucky doesn’t give him time to dramatize. “In or out, punk,” he says. Friday starts the music again. The waltz is replaced by a complicated Latin beat, and Adam Duritz and Marjorie are replaced by China Forbes, who wishes a falling star could fall forever. Lily steps back into Bucky’s hold and their feet move in perfect sync. 

Darcy looks at them and then at Steve. “You wanted him to be OK,” she reminds him. “You gonna dance?” 

“Not to this,” he laughs. “I’m not that good a dancer.”

“Want me to teach you?”

By the time the playlist comes to an end, (China Forbes again, promising that sunny someday is on its way,) all four of them are tired and peaceful. Steve has apologized and been waved off. The other three have thanked Lily and been shrugged at. Steve and Bucky work together to put the tables and chairs back, and Darcy drags Lily to her apartment and the spare room. “I don’t know where Dad got the idea that the Avengers don’t need someone who deals with ghosts,” she says.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I gather from my kid's youtube habits that "clutch" is a good thing now, but it's not in the Weetzie books; Witch Baby used to call everyone a "Clutch pig."
> 
> For those of you who get into playlists:  
> [Flat foot Floogie](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yLwGna15NcI)  
> [Rag Mop](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Aa77lBHciRQ)  
> [Big Fat Mama](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RbPrgA0qmxA)  
> [Wine Spo-di-o-di](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g0lmX06odhw)  
> [Hound Dog]() (Witch Baby has the Big Mama Thornton version because she is kind of a music snob.)  
> [Another Horsedreamer's Blues](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZAAzMeKVErw) (the inappropriate waltz.)  
> [Let's Never Stop Falling in Love](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZAAzMeKVErw) (the rumba Steve won't dance to)  
> [Hang on Little Tomato](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Jz706sJMjg) (the last dance of the evening.)


	12. Bandwidth

It’s funny how, even when the party is at Mallard and Meadows’ apartment (while the two of them are following up a lead in Connecticut) and Lily is hosting, the life and energy of the room centers around Darcy, Steve, and Sam, while Lily, Wanda, and Bucky drift in and out and watch from their favored perches. This time, Wanda sits at the card table with the other four, joining in the game if not the banter. Bucky reads in the window seat. ( _Rediscovery of Man_ now falls open at “Scanners Live in Vain” instead of “The Dead Lady of Clown Town.” Lily knows what she’s getting someone for Christmas.) Lily paces, refilling the bowls of salsa and chips, zapping fallen crumbs with the handi-vac before they get ground into the carpet. When she swings by the end table where Bucky’s snack bowl sits, he looks up and says her name.

Their eyes meet briefly. Bucky swings the foot that was resting on the window seat down to the floor and scoots to make room. Lily squinches into the space, settling her back against the opposite corner of the window from Bucky, the handi-vac resting in her lap. Their knees are touching. Lily says, “Yeah?”

Bucky frowns and his left arm makes clicking sounds. “I need to know,” he says to his own feet, “Are you scared of me?”

Lily has to think about it. She drums her fingers on the sticky plastic of the handi-vac. But finally she shakes her head. “I don’t think I am. You just… you take a lot of bandwidth.”

She isn’t looking at him, either, but she hears the little snort he makes that goes with the corner of his mouth twitching into a hidden smile. “How’s that again?”

Lily sighs. Words, always words. “You’re… there, in my head,” she says. “More than makes sense. Maybe it’s fear, but it doesn’t feel like it. Maybe you have enough Pictish blood in you to make you show up on… on the Other Side. Maybe it’s only that you’re very pretty, and hurt.” She jerks her shoulders too quickly for it to quite count as a shrug. “I’m sorry if it bothers you.”

“You tend to smell like fear when I’m around,” Bucky says. “Only just a little bit.”

Lily shrugs again. “When you’re around, Steve usually is, too.”

 _“Stevie?”_ Bucky’s question and the crack of laughter that follow it are loud enough to make everyone in the room look at them for a moment. Steve smiles to see his friend happy and calls a lighthearted warning:

“Buck, you’d better not be telling one of your girls the story about the Geraci twins and the chewing tobacco.”

Sam perks up in curiosity, and Bucky, still laughing, flaps a hand at them all. “Go back to your space monkeys, punk.”

Steve obliges, looking happier. Bucky turns back to Lily, his eyebrows all the way up. “Really, Lil? The thing that gave the Black Widow nightmares doesn’t scare you, but Steve does?” He shakes his head and his smile gentles. “He’d never hurt a hair on your head, doll.”

Lily stands up abruptly and starts toward the kitchen. “It would only take two words to change that,” she mutters.

“Wait-” Bucky scrambles upright after her. “Two words, what? You gotta explain this one, Lil.”

Lily scoots past the card table, where everybody is watching them again. Both men shift in their seats, ready to intervene, but Wanda waves them down again. Lily goes on into the kitchen. “Both of them begin with ‘H,’ she says over her shoulder.

It takes Bucky a couple of seconds to parse that one and then he throws his hands in the air. “What’s it matter? You ain’t gonna say _those_ words!” Another couple of seconds and his face shuts down in a suspicious frown and his shoulders seem to grow broader. His voice drops half an octave for his next question. “Are you?”

Lily puts the handi-vac back in its charger cradle and turns around slowly, making no move toward the kitchen knives or any other weapon. Bucky looms in the doorway, glowering at her, far enough away that he will see any move she makes before it connects, close enough to stop her if she pulls a gun. The voices down the hall sound like the rest of the party will be following along soon, no matter what Wanda says. Lily keeps still. “I am not,” she says. “Not now, not ten years from now. But unlike Steve, I can imagine the world where I would say those words and mean them. I can imagine _more than one_ world like that, because I will still want to survive even if the wrong side wins the war, and because Hydra is made of people, and people change. It’s Abraham Lincoln’s party busting the unions and trying to stop black people voting now, after all.”

Bucky deflates a little, but not all the way. “If you ain’t Hydra, you got nothing to fear from any of us here,” he says. “Except maybe me, and then only if something sets me off.”

Lily shakes her head impatiently. “I hate words,” she says. “Maybe I can show you what I mean instead. If you still care.”

“Yeah, I want this one sorted out. You’re makin’ my brain itch.”

But they are delayed by the rest of the party hovering in the hallway, eavesdropping. Lily disperses them by announcing that the food will be done in ten minutes, so they finish their game and clear the table, and Wanda summons napkins and plates and silverware from the kitchen, and they all settle in to eat Spanish Rice with red beans and Tofu-peanut butter enchiladas and Waldorf salad, just as though they hadn’t been nibbling chips and salsa for the last hour. Lily would have said she has no talent for small talk, but she joins in when Darcy and Sam start comparing east coast vs. New Mexico variations on cheap, inauthentic Mexican food. Lily’s description of the “mushuritos” she lived on during her freshman year of college make Wanda look a little green. Steve laughs, and Sam thunks himself in the forehead. As the eating slows down, Darcy pesters everyone to join in a board game called “Jedi Cataan” afterward: “I mean, the rules make it sound like Econ 101 in game form but I swear it is actualfax fun.” 

Bucky frowns. “Lil was explaining something to me. Maybe after.” And just that fast, everyone is done eating.

Lily’s photo album from the first time she came to New York is in a box under her bed, and Bucky follows her down the hall and leans on the doorframe while she goes digging. She has found last year’s taxes and her copy of _Freedom and Neccessity_ when she hears the familiar gravelly voice. “The hell is all this fucked-up shit on your wall, Lil?”

He must have started actually reading the newspaper articles she has pasted up. Child soldiers in Angola, an oil spill off the gulf coast, a man who killed his family and buried them in the back yard and no one noticed for months… since Lily was old enough to read, she has cut out the three worst things she could find in the newspaper every day, and pasted them to her wall or stored them in a shoebox. The _Times_ coverage of the Winter Soldier Trial is in above the radiator, partly hidden by the sheet music genie the flea market lady gave her. Lily’s hands reaching under the bed find the box she thinks the photo albums are in

“It’s superstition,” she calls from under the bed, starting to wriggle backward until she can bring her head up again. “Like, if I pin the bad news to my wall, it can’t sneak up behind my back and get me. If my room is full of reminders of how clutch it can get and how lucky I am, if I’m grateful enough, maybe it won’t be taken away."

"So you do actually know you’re nuts.” 

"I try to make sure I do three things that help every day, too. Sign petitions. Plant beans in window boxes. Help people get un-haunted who can’t afford it. Only… it’s also part of the other thing.” Lily runs a hand through her hair, leaving a smear of dirt on her forehead and releasing a dust bunny that got caught in her curls.

Bucky has his head tilted to one side, listening. Lily can’t tell if what she says is making sense to him or not. “For someone who hates words, you sure use a lot of ‘em when you get going.” 

"Double major in Psych and Anthro. Lots and lots of papers, so I’m trained, whether I like them or not. Like you and guns.”

Bucky grunts. “Why are you scared of Steve and not me?”

Lily finally finds the album and pulls it out, feeling its puffy vinyl cover squish under her fingers, and hands it over to Bucky. He starts to flip through it, looking confused, while Lily talks. “People like Steve, they think there’s a right thing people can do that will fix all of this.” She waves a hand at her yellow-gray walls. “Like, if only enough people are good enough, brave enough… if only we stop enough bad people. It sounds good, but it ends up being very… unforgiving.” Lily unfolds herself and comes to look at the album over Bucky’s shoulder. “I know we need True Believers, but they scare the shit out of me.”

Darcy’s footsteps thump down the hall toward them, her keyring jangling at her hip. Darcy always moves noisily, she explained to Lily once, because the Avengers feel safer when they know she’s coming, and because the bad guys don’t expect her of being capable of sneaking when she has to. “Ready to rejoin your own party yet, Lily-billy? Hey, whatcha got there, Buck?”

“Pictures.” 

Darcy tries to wriggle between Bucky and Lily to see the album too, but there isn’t room in the doorway. They all end up sitting on the bed, with Lily in the middle and the album on her lap, looking at the pictures Lily took on her first New York adventure, ten years ago. Lily feels Bucky’s huff of breath on her neck when they get to the one of the shop window display with its pale central figure in the middle of the kneeling children, looking like David Bowie among the goblins. “That what I think it is?”

Lily nods. “It came after my boyfriend and me that time. But the ones I wanted to show you are toward the back.” She flips a few pages, and there are all the Witch Babies. She’d spent a whole day with her camera and Charlie Bat’s dress-up trunk, facing all her selves. 

From the black-and-white pages, a dozen teenage Witch Babies stare out with their tilty eyes from under the wild cloud of curly hair. Cupid Witch Baby with a tunic made from a sheet, and plastic molded wings, a few dark tendrils escaping from under the blonde wig. Nefertiti Witch Baby with about fifteen necklaces and a paper headdress crown that looks better in the photo than it did in real life. Ghost Witch Baby, her face shattered in the pieces of a shattered mirror. Genie Witch baby with a shining scarf turban. And the others.

“Cool beans” Darcy says. “Were you doing like a Cindy Sherman kind of thing?” 

Lily shakes her head. “I think Sherman’s work is about the roles that other people make women play, right? But I was trying to be all the people I was inside."

“Jung.” Bucky rasps.

“Right.” Lily points at one picture, where tilty eyes peer out from the holes of an ugster rubber monster mask. Witch Baby’s skinny goblin hands clutch at a hairy bathmat rug she has wrapped around like a fur stole. “This one.” She says. “The one that wants too much, that scratches and scrabbles and howls. The one that made Cake stronger and almost trapped me and Angel Juan both. The reason your friend scares me more than you do, is, you know yours is inside you and you try to keep it on a leash. Steve goes tearing all over Europe trying to smash his.”

Bucky says, “Huh,” and ducks over the album, whatever emotions he’s feeling hidden behind his hair. 

Darcy looks at Lily, surprised and a little bit hurt. “Steve scares you?”

Lily jerks her head at Bucky. “He had a hard time with that one too. And it’s not that I don’t like him. But Steve’s always angry. Even when he’s happy, at least a little bit. I’m always scared, at least a little bit. Doesn’t mix well. Same thing with me and Tony, really, except Tony’s angry and scared that he’s angry, so.” She tilts her head at Darcy and tries a sad, sideways smile. “Sorry.”

Darcy flutters. “Yeah. No. I mean, I get that. That’s like, holy crap, you just summarized why the Accords mess sucked so hard. It’s just, whoo. I don’t usually do truth bombs without jaeger bombs to go with, so...” Darcy thumps her chest. “I mean, I thought I was just going to tease the pair of you about how weird your courting rituals are and you go and turn my head inside out.”

“ ‘S what she does,” Bucky mutters.

Darcy bites her lip. “Um, would you be super offended if we all peaced instead of staying around for another round of games? ‘Cause, like, I think the mood has fled.”

Lily smiles and shakes her head. “It’s fine, Darcy. Let’s go back to the living room.”

They all shift about and stand up. Darcy thumps back up the hallway to bring the other three up to speed. Lily puts the album back in its box and kneels to shove it back under the bed. A hand ruffles through her hair and she can feel it all the way down her spine.

“Bandwidth,” Bucky says. “Huh.”


	13. Halfway off the Cliff

“That won’t work, either. I’ve got work all that day and Fred Za’s class in the evening.” Darcy is trying to find a day to reserve the party space at The Painted Pot, and for once it is Lily’s schedule that is the problem. “I don’t actually have to be there, you know,” she tells Darcy.

“You do so, it was your List of Things that Do Not Suck that gave me the idea in the first place! C’mon, Lily. You don’t tell me you wouldn’t make the time for this if it was Bucky asking you out dancing.”

Since Lily’s party, Bucky has stopped claiming the Introvert Chair and started acting more like Wanda, lurking nearby wherever the action is, pretending not to care. Now, he looks up and glares at Darcy, who winks at him, and Steve, who cocks his head and looks at his friend with a stuffed expression. Lily thinks she might be blushing. Then Bucky looks at her and she is certain of it. Bandwidth. All circuits overloading. He doesn’t say anything about Darcy’s teasing, though. “What exactly do you do for a living, Lil? Is it all ghosts?”

“It’s called the gig economy,” Lily tells him. “I think in the thirties they just called it hustling. My apprenticeship with Mallard and Meadows covers room and board. I get a share of the money anytime I go out and do ghost things on my own. About once a month someone will hire me as a photographer for an event or order one of my prints. I’m a session drummer, which means I might not meet the rest of the band until an hour before the party we’re playing at. I also compose songs, or parts of songs, and sometimes one of those sells.”

“Parts of songs?”

“That’s how it works. Not the only way it works, but one of them. I’ve got five lines and a guitar riff playing on the Country stations right now.”

Agent Troll emerges from somewhere. “Country? You? Which song?”

So Lily sings, down in her chest, her quiet voice sounding richer than it does when she speaks.

_Please, honey baby,_  
_Won’t you go to sleep._  
_Dream your pretty dreams so long and deep,_  
_Keep on sleepin’ ‘til the morning light,_  
_‘Cause your mama and your daddy’s gettin’ lucky tonight._

Bucky’s lips twitch. Clint slaps Lily on the back. “I love that one!” he tells her happily.

Lily ducks her head. “It’s based off a medieval Spanish lullaby, but don’t tell my agent. And when all else fails I babysit.”

Steve wrinkles his forehead. “Seems like an awfully raw deal, having to- to sell yourself like that all the time. I mean, not like… you know what I mean. You went to college!” He says “college” the way Cherokee says “Paris.” He sounds reverent.

Darcy pats her lover on his elephantine shoulder. “That doesn’t mean quite what it used to, sweetheart.”

“I’m one of the lucky ones,” Lily insists, speaking more to Bucky than Steve. Steve looks confused, but Bucky is grim and worried. “I do this partly out of choice, and because I have people who will buy what I sell. A lot of my classmates are waiting tables and answering phones and volunteering for people who can’t afford to pay them so they’ll have the relevant job experience when they try to get hired somewhere that offers health insurance.” 

Steve grumbles. “That’s lucky? No wonder Hydra’s able to make their sham safety look so good to people these days. Almost makes me wanna hang up the shield and run for congress or something.”

Darcy grins and leans over to kiss him on the cheek. “Aww, Steve, you’re so sweet! Changing careers just so I can use my degree...”

Lily gathers her things together and gets ready to leave, and Bucky shoves up from the armchair and follows her to the door. “I think you and me better have a talk,” he says. “Can I walk you to the train?”

Lily nods and Clint whistles and Steve glares at Clint. Bucky pulls on a long-sleeved gray shirt that looks like part of a garage mechanic’s uniform, pulls a lanyard holding several cards and a set of keys over his head to dangle on his chest, and pulls his hair through the back tab of a baseball cap. He retrieves a battered knapsack from under the couch. “C’mon, then.” 

They get to the elevator in silence. Lily keeps looking at him and away, and when the doors close and the car starts moving, she says, “So.”

“So.” Bucky is leaning back against the handrail, and Lily is standing straight upright, and their eyes are on the level. They don’t usually look at each other’s eyes, much. Lily can take about five seconds and then she has to look down. “If,” he says, in his dry smoker’s rasp, “I did ask you out dancing?”

Lily swallows and nods. “I’m not opposed,” she says slowly. “I mean. It seems like… I don’t know, bigger, somehow, than it should. Or maybe that’s just me. I mean, I’ve never dated. I’ve been with Angel Juan since I was six. There’s a whole… game thing, ritual, whatever, that I never learned. Well, and I guess the game has changed a lot since you learned it, too.” She looks up again, and his eyes have not moved; he’s focused on her face with his sniper’s gaze, his whole self looking only at her.

“It is bigger,” he says. His voice is a warning. “Any sensible person would tell a guy like me to take it slow with the dames; I got a lot on my plate even without having to fight off the end of the world. But I kinda can’t. Not with you. The cliff’s a lot steeper than you maybe realize.”

“OK.” Lily leans back, her fingers tapping the _kpanlogo_ rhythm silently against the elevator wall opposite from Bucky. “I'm listening,” she tells him.

Bucky nods, then opens his mouth and closes it a couple of times. His right hand twitches like he's grabbing the words he needs and trying to hold them down. “You’ve come about as close to Darcy and the rest of us as you can without being in danger,” he says finally. “If we take things any further, you and me, you'll have a target on your back. I mean, you know Hollywood. You know what'd happen to you if you got close to… who’s like the Barrymores, now?”

Lily smirks. “There are still Barrymores in Hollywood now. And I get it.”

Bucky shakes his head. “Do you? If you step out with the Winter Soldier, you're getting all of that plus every yahoo who's got a grudge on me for how the trial came out, plus AIM and Hydra and crazy gods and aliens… anyone who doesn't care who they go through to get to me. So that means every client you have – for the photos or the ghost work or anything – gets a background check. It means two armed guards any time you go for a pub crawl. It means if you go to a concert you stay out of the mosh pit. It means security cameras and electronic gates _at least_ at your family's homes in California. I mean, it's different for Darcy and Stevie 'cause she's got the whole Stark thing goin’ on already, but you, you might as well…. the Avengers are at war. And things move fast in wartime. And it ain't fair to pull you into that for anything small, and it ain't fair to make you decide this quick, but… there it is.”

Lily couldn’t look at him before, and now she can’t look away. She thinks a jumble of things, never taking her eyes from his. She thinks about the Warning Signs of an Abusive Relationship she's read in magazines and health classes and things all her life. She thinks about a roomful of ghosts and a man curled up in the middle of the floor snarling at them. She thinks about a wall full of newspaper articles about murders and refugee boats and earthquakes and falling towers. She thinks about a pair of eyes, watching them from somewhere beyond the stars and planning. 

“If you had three wishes...” she says, and he blinks at last, and smiles. The elevator opens on a corridor Lily has never seen before – very plain and utilitarian, with gray metal doors that don’t have names over them, and no windows. Bucky takes Lily’s left hand in his right and guides her out with a Fred Astaire sweep of his arm. 

“Don’t forget I’m screwy in the head, darlin’,” he says as he leads her down the hall, “We could get married at the courthouse tomorrow, and everyone who knows me including the headshrinkers knows that would be a lousy idea, but there is still no way the worst thing that could come of it would hold a candle to my best day as Hydra’s tool. I’m willing to make a go of it, but I’ve got nothin’ to lose. You, though, you’d pretty much need to change careers, ain’t it? And you’d have to depend on, well, me, to treat you right through all that. It’s pretty much all or nothin’.”

As if to underline the finality of this statement, one of the doors unlocks with a loud, echoing clack-chunk. Bucky steps out, looks left and right, pulls the door open the rest of the way, and waves Lily out onto the melting-hot street. “I’ll take your guest badge,” he says, and reaches out to unclip it from the collar of Lily’s tee-shirt and add it to his own lanyard. Lily tilts her newsboy cap to a new angle, the better to block out the afternoon sunlight, and take’s Bucky’s offered elbow. She tries to think.

“Do we know how long we have before Thanos shows up?”  
Bucky shoots her a sideways glance. His mouth tightens. “Not long,” he says. “More than a week, less than a year.”

Lily concentrates on walking, keeping her feet moving forward as the hollow feeling moves down her gut and her bowels try to loosen. If she goes on with Bucky, the bad things will not stay settled on the newspaper walls. But they won’t anyway.

“Dealing with Thanos has to come first,” she says. “Dr. Strange said my training would change, after, and I need Mallard and Meadows and Fred Za, before then, to do what I need to do for that. So we don’t… step out until that’s done. But…” Lily fishes in a pocket and pulls out a business card: _Mallard and Meadows, Paranormal Investigation and Negotiations. Lily Bat, Junior Investigator._ “Call me. Or text. We keep talking, about the real things, like it’s a contract or whatever. About all the things we need to work out, assuming the answer is yes.”

They have come to a subway entrance – not the usual one Lily goes to when she is visiting Darcy. Bucky strokes his fingers along Lily’s hand before he tucks the card into the pocket of his knapsack, and he continues down the street, away from the tower. He’ll double back at some point, Lily supposes, in a different disguise. Lily’s foot hovers over the subway stairs for an instant.

 _I am the fool in the Tarot deck,_ she thinks, _just about to step off the cliff while I look up a the sun. Then she thinks, _my sister gave me a pair of wings, once upon a time.__

__

When she gets off the train a few blocks from Meat Street, her phone buzzes. A new number: _I understand it’s bad news to date your headshrinker. I guess if the ghosts come back I’ll need to call Mallard or Meadows?_ Lily enters the contact in her phone as “Silent Bob." 

__


	14. Brief Excerpts from Long Conversations

They're careful, after that, even in the tower, not to single each other out too much, not to sit too close together. But they cut out small talk, when they talk at all, and they text back and forth, steadily, each of them taking time to think before hitting reply. They find lists of questions intended for potential roommates, for couples talking marriage, for starting dinner conversations. Lily tries hard to be honest, not to be the prettied-up version of herself that she tries to be for job interviews or auditions. She talks sometimes about how she came to need Angel Juan like a drug in her veins, like he was a parachute and a suit of armor and a guard dog all at once… Maybe Bucky doesn't need someone who can be so raw and needy in his life. He's got more than a few problems of his own. All he says, though, is “I envy the way you trust people. The way you know you're strong enough to take the hurt that comes, if and when it does.” They keep talking. Thanos is coming. The cliff is a steep one. They don't have time to be anything but real.

…...

**Me:** _So, what kind of work would I be doing, if I throw in with you guys long-term?_

**Silent Bob:** _Well, you wouldn't have to give up the songwriting or the recording. If you’ve got your license you could go on the headshrinker roster for SI and a couple of other groups that deal with weird shit. I bet you’d be good._

…..

“Took me a while to realize you don't eat meat. I think they invented about a million new things to do with beans and rice while I was otherwise occupied.”

“Yeah, my whole family is pretty much vegetarian. Well, we'll do fish sometimes. Sushi, mostly, but there's this spot by Duck's favorite beach that does red snapper chowder… anyway, yeah.”

“Any problem sharing a kitchen with a carnivore?”

“Not as long as I don't have to cook it.”

…...

 **Silent Bob:** _What do you do when you're really upset?_

**Me:** _Break things, sometimes. Run away and hide._

**Silent Bob:** _Same here. We make a go of it, we might need some kind of protocol._

**Me:** _And a really good vacuum cleaner._

**Silent Bob:** :p

…..

“Angel Juan's Catholic too, you know. I was raised kind of California Woowoo Pantheist, but I always thought…. I don’t think I believe a single one of the Articles of Faith, but I can still see how the whole thing works: the music and the rituals and the saints that maybe used to be pagan gods and the ways people take care of each other. It’s a house I could find ways to live in, if it was important to… someone.”

Bucky flashes his there-and-gone grin and ducks his head. “Maybe I'll look into California Woowoo Pantheist. It sounds kinda fun.”

“It can be, but … Darcy says you get overwhelmed by Baskin & Robbins. DIY theology might be more than you want to take on.”

…...

 **Silent Bob:** _Bad day today. I keep screwing up, and Steve and everyone won’t even get mad at me. Makes me feel about two inches tall. These guys went to UNDERWATER JAIL! Even if what happened to me was just a part of that, how do I start to deserve that kind of sacrifice?_

**Me:** _“For we each of us deserve everything, every luxury that was ever piled in the tombs of the dead kings, and we each of us deserve nothing, not a mouthful of bread in hunger. Have we not eaten while another starved? Will you punish us for that? Will you reward us for the virtue of starving while others ate? No man earns punishment, no man earns reward. Free your mind of the idea of deserving, the idea of earning, and you will begin to be able to think.” ~ Ursula LeGuin, The Dispossessed._

**Me:** _Or, IDK, maybe she's just finding a good-sounding way to assuage Rich(ish) White People Guilt. I go back and forth on that one._

......

“What, exactly, is the difference between being a fledgling genie who grants wishes and being a people-pleaser?” Sam sounds faintly amused, but then, he usually does when he runs up against what he calls “dramatics.”

Lily taps her fingers and thinks. “Depth, maybe? I’m not running around trying to guess what people want and tie myself in knots trying to make people happy. If I’m granting a wish, someone has to make a wish: actually say what they want, out loud. And it isn’t always about making people happy. Like, when I outed Duck and Dirk to Duck’s mom, everybody cried and Duck’s greaseburger stepdad made horrible jokes and Dirk and Duck drove away angry and didn’t speak to me for days. But Duck had wished out loud that he could tell his mom about his boyfriend. He couldn’t, but I did.”

“What happened after that?”

“Mrs. Drake got over it by the time we got back to L.A, and they’re friends now, but it didn’t have to be like that. The wish would have been the same either way.” Lily looks around the room to see who else is listening. Darcy and Steve are whispering together, Natasha is pretending to read, Bucky is sharpening knives. Lily raises her voice a little. “So, y’know, be really, really careful what you wish for around me. Sometimes it’s something I do on purpose, but not always, and I don’t always know how it works.”

Bucky waits until Steve and Darcy have wandered off and Sam and Natasha both seem to have stopped paying attention. (Neither of them has stopped paying attention. He knows this.)

“If I get three wishes,” he says, quietly and intensely, “my first one would be that I – the Winter Soldier – that I never hurt another innocent. That no one else can use us that way again. Ever.”

 _He has that already_ , Lily thinks, but she knows about doubt and fear, and she might be wrong, and what she says out loud is, “I’ll see what I can do.”  
…..

“Would it kill Tony to use your fuckin' name once in a while?”

“I'm actually kind of flattered by the nicknames.”

“For real?”

Lily counts on her fingers. “He's not calling me Witch Baby, which is reserved for family members. He's not calling me Beanpole, or Hippie Freak, or any of the other things the kids used to call me in school when they meant to hurt me. He's not looking over my shoulder at a screen so Friday can remind him who I am. He's not being, like, super creepy fake nice… I can work with that.”

“Kids called you names in school?” Bucky sounds surprised and angry.

Lily shrugs. “I mean, I played it up. When Evan Thurgood started giving Kee trouble about dating a black guy, I broke into his locker and painted voodoo signs all over the inside. And Cherokee was there for me, and Raphael, and Angel Juan, and we had Dad's movies and our band and all. So, like, the names were just… drawing lines. Like, we weren't their people. Which we knew already.”

“I hope your people told you how amazing you are.”

……

 **Silent Bob:** _I probably have – or had – children out there somewhere; and maybe clones. They took enough blood from me over the years trying to synthesize the serum, can’t imagine they weren’t trying other stuff too._

**Me:** _I’m going to file that under Shit to Deal with When It Comes Up, Not Before. Along with questions about lifespans and rates of aging._

**Silent Bob:** _You think I'd throw you over if you got more wrinkles than me?_

**Me:** _Dirk's great-grandfather the genie still looks like he's about forty, according to Weetzie. Maybe I should ask *you* that._

……

“The words weren't even the hardest part to get rid of; words go to a part of the brain they were tryin' to shut down, after all.”

“So they used… smell?”

“Good guess, Lil. Hydra ruined peppermint for me. Used it when… when they were giving the… the asset new mission parameters. I think the idea was, any time I happened to smell it it would… reinforce things. Now it makes me choke up if I ain't prepared for it. The stuff is fuckin' everywhere, too, 'specially if you got an enhanced nose.”

“So… bubblegum toothpaste?”

“I usually just use baking soda.”

“I meant for me.”

“…… oh.”

…….

The next time she comes by the tower, she has something to give. Bucky lets the tiny black leather bag sit limply in his metal palm and glares at it with deep skepticism. “A _gris-gris?_ You shittin’ me?”

“Fred Za helped me make it,” Lily says, arms crossed over her chest. “It should work kind of like a grounding line when you get triggered. Won’t do much about the nightmares, but it should stop you from attacking anyone as you come out of them. Fred says it will last ‘until your dog finds you,’ whatever that means.”

“So the best your mentor can do for me is Dumbo’s magic feather?”

Sam looks up from his book and chuckles. “Nice job on a slightly more up-to-date cultural reference than usual.” 

Bucky gives him a harassed glance and then peers into the open mouth of the little bag. He smells herbs and sees a glint of metal and a glare of bone, and then he looks at Lily again.

She looks back. “If it helps,” she says, “I’ll send you the link to the article . Turns out the Placebo Effect works sometimes even when you know it’s a placebo. But I know what’s in this,” she pokes the bag, “besides what you can see. It will work.”

“That so?” But Bucky’s lips twitch with amusement. “Well, what the hell.”

Lily talks him through the last few steps of the spell. He combs a few lose hairs out with his fingers and winds them in a loop. He blows through the hole of a lumpy silver bead, which joins the hairs in the little pouch. He pulls the cord tight and knots it, then seals the knot with a drop of blood he pricks out of his finger with a silver needle Lily gives him.

“That’s it?”

Lily nods, “Wear it around your neck. Don’t open it again. It’s fine if it gets wet. Maybe hold it in your hand and wrap the cord around your wrist at night so it doesn’t accidentally choke you.”

“OK...” Bucky is laughing now, somewhere behind his eyes, but he lets his head drop down and pulls the cord over it to loop around his neck.

_At the Stark Expo, forever ago, there is a Van de Graaf Generator, a little silver moon on a slender stand. It makes the children’s hair stand on end and the gals’ skirts cling to their legs and sometimes snap and spark. At the end of your turn, the barker touches you and then the globe with a little key, and a strange hollow tingle runs all through you and is gone, too fast to know quite what it was. Bucky blinks and is here and now, looking at purple eyes in a sharp-boned face that is just a tiny bit smug. “Huh,” he says. He tucks the little bag under his shirt._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For this particular chapter I completely admit defeat on the "Try to write like Francesca Lia Block" part of this self-imposed writing challenge. The Block formula for writing about two people falling in love involves Fate going WHUMP! followed by a paragraph long sentence structured like a movie montage where the OTP does things, plus a collection of swoony metaphors involving pop culture icons. And the challenges the OTP surmounts later often involve very little actual interaction between the two, though the what little there is is usually pretty good... I dunno, it was all a lot more convincing when I was sixteen. Oh, well.
> 
> BTW- Bucky's dog will not be finding him in this fic, but I like the idea of it being Lockjaw from the Inhumans.


	15. Goat Guys Reunion

Thanos is coming. It won’t be as long as a year, or even a season. It _might_ be more than a week, still. It might be as much as a month, if they are lucky. Nobody will say where Tony Stark is, though Darcy and Pepper both look strained and red-eyed. Steve has stopped making public appearances, and he and Darcy are never more than twenty feet apart; she brings her work computer to the gym to watch him train now. Natasha oozes up to Lily as she walks up Meat Street to the bodega, and murmurs, “I’d start rehearsing with your bandmates if I were you,” and Lily doesn’t spot her again after that even once. 

Cherokee’s reply text comes less than half an hour after Lily called her.  
**Brat Mat:** _Best thing about me working for Mom and Raf working for Duck, it’s easy to get some open-ended time off to help my sister defeat a Mystic Nihilist from Space TM. Flight info attached! :)_

Lily lets Darcy know, and Darcy immediately starts planning a party.

%%%%%%%%%%

Cherokee is less than a year older than Witch B- than Lily, but, like Darcy Mermaid, she can turn adulthood on and off like a switch. When she spots Lily waiting for her by the rental car pickup at LaGuardia, she shrieks, “Witch!” at the top of her lungs and comes running, wisps of hair coming loose from her braided bun and shoes skittering as her ridiculous giant suitcase bumps along behind her. She looks about ten. Lily is startled to feel the hard little beginnings of a pregnancy bump pressing against her belly in the middle of Cherokee’s tight hug. Later, on the slow drive through town to Kee’s and Raf’s AirB&B, as she explains her intentions to do some networking on behalf of Weetzie’s Wearables while she’s in town, Cherokee could be nearly forty. Then Lily tells her Darcy Lewis-Stark is planning a party for them and she squeals like a toddler.

Raphael is much more subdued; he hates traveling. He hates squeezing his six-three frame into airplane seats, hates having to get his dreads tightened and wear slacks and a button-down, hates that no matter how much care he puts into his appearance, some stranger will approach his pale blonde wife and ask if he’s bothering her. Later, when they are eating dinner with Mallard and Meadows, or at Darcy’s party, he will expand: will unroll his low-slung, surfer gait like a lion stalking its prey and smile his big, slow, patchouli smile, and casually out-sexy three Avengers. (Wanda doesn’t count; Wanda is preparing for death and loss, and a battle for a one percent chance, and she doesn’t register sexy at all.) For the first two hours after he gets off the plane, though, Raphael is a tidy shadow.

Angel Juan does not send travel information, or even tell Lily he got her message. He just shows up the morning after Cherokee and Raphael do. Lily finds him stretched out on Meadows’ Morris chair, asleep. He could have flown or taken the train or hitchhiked. He could have been squatting in Hell’s Kitchen for the last six months, waiting for Lily to call. Mallard may have let him in late last night while Lily was sleeping, or he could have snuck in somehow. Angel Juan will never be pinned down. 

Lily stands grinning in the gypsy-tent living room, watching her first love wake up. Watches the thin orange blade of light from the crack between the windowseat curtains cut across his face, watches his red-plum lips purse a little under the thin pachuco mustache he grew this year. Angel Juan stretches his whole spine in a single, vibrating moment, and then his long eyelashes flutter up and the mouth spreads out in a smile. “There you are, Niña Bruja,” and he jumps out of the Morris chair and folds it upright in a single spring, and wraps Lily in a hug. 

She hugs him back, smelling the garlic and cumin and oil smell that means Angel Juan is probably working in a restaurant again. His lips meet hers and… Lily has written whole albums’ worth of songs about kissing Angel Juan, over the years. Songs about running wild as jackrabbits through a neon glow, songs about jacaranda moons, about silver cactus fur guarding a wet, squishy heart. Songs about thin, wiry arms like bindweed, rooting her to the ground, over and over. She kisses him back. His arms are arms. His lips are lips.

Angel Juan pulls back a little and shakes his head. “We’re really not doing that anymore, are we, Niña.” It’s not even a question. Lily feel lost, and sad, and afraid. She is the one who did this, who broke the thing between them, stretched it until it snapped, and she didn’t even mean to. But Angel Juan pulls her in for another hug and says, “Easy, Baby Lamb, it’s OK. It’s OK.” 

And he’s been half her soul for so long, even if they’re something else now, that when he says, "OK," it is. He hugs Cherokee and Raphael when they come in the door, tells them all stories about Nepal and Monaco and Belize and anywhere else he’s drifted through in the last few years, gives Cherokee another half dozen names to consider for Baby Bat Chong Jah Love. 

“I’m thinking of giving it a brand new last name,” Cherokee says, “Because, Bat Chong Jah Love is really too much. Maybe we could do an anagram: LeChaton? Bhanva?”

“How about McDonald, for Dirk? ‘Cause, I mean, we’ve got about a million Drake nieces and nephews, and the other Jah-Loves in Jamaica, and Max and Weetzie have their movies, and me, but Dirk doesn’t have anyone but you, and it was his grandma Fifi’s magic lamp that started the whole thing.”

Cherokee sniffles. “That’s such a sweet idea, Witch Baby!”

“Is that your genie wish powers coming out, Witch?”

But before Lily can say she doesn’t know, Mallard and Meadows amble out of their bedroom, arm in arm, dressed and combed for the day. Angel Juan springs up out of Meadows’ Morris chair, but Mallard steers Meadows to the table and heads into the kitchen, leaning on his cane. 

Lily is worried. “Want me to get breakfast, Mallard?” He usually doesn’t need the cane this early in the day. Besides, Lily has been hanging out with Darcy and texting Silent Bob and kind of neglecting her Apprentice-type duties lately. She should vacuum.

“That would be welcome, thank you, Lily.” Mallard sounds like a clarinet, even first thing in the morning. He has been training to be elegant and polite since before Weetzie was born, and now it is part of his bones. Lily swivels past the two pulled-out dining chairs into the kitchen, fetches melon slices from the fridge, spreads almond butter on slices of challa. Meadows’ voice, a shaky oboe, pipes up when he hears her lift the giant spatterware kettle off the stove. “The Earl Grey today, please, Lily. We have an Outing.”

“Or rather,” Mallard corrects as Lily pours hot water over a strainer into teacups thin as the glass in a Christmas ornament, “I have an Outing today, in preparation for further Outings. It appears Meadows and I are needed in Paris. There are arrangements to be made.”

“And in the meantime,” Meadows continues, as Lily come back into the room, “I will work with you children to make certain the… Goat Guys… are as ready as possible for your part in the proceedings.”

%%%%%%%

It surprises Lily, the ease of it all, being with her sister and her brother-in-law and her animus again. They agree that they will not rehearse today, but there are choices to be made. Which songs should they practice? Is it more important to choose ones they know well or ones that Lily wrote? Will they be singing? Will Raphael and Angel Juan play their electric instruments or the acoustic ones? Which drums for Lily? Angel Juan and Raphael and Lily run to the Farmer’s Market while Cherokee takes a gestation nap, and afterward they all crowd into the tiny apartment kitchen to cook vats of vegetable lasagna and Thai Spice Peanut Butter Chia Balls and Jah-Love Rice and Bean and Cheese Enchiladas, enough to fill Mallard and Meadows’ refrigerator to the brim, with the foil-covered casserole dishes stacked on top of each other. They’ll be working too hard to think about food for a while.

The Goat Guys had seemed sometimes like a single magic beast with eight arms and eight dancing feet, and sometimes, that day, it still feels like it. They work together just as they used to: Cherokee shoots off ideas like sparks, Witch Baby (she stopped being Lily completely somewhere around the second time Mr. Meadows asked them to translate the Spanglish they’d slipped into without noticing) gives those sparks heart. Raphael grounds them, Angel Juan makes them bend and slip and run. (It is both ironic and not, that when they play, Angel Juan’s bass is the driving engine and Raph’s guitar soars like wings. Because the Goat Guys is one magic beast and they all breathe for it.)

“I made us costumes,” Cherokee announces. Witch Baby feels the hollowness moving down her gut again and her lips curl in the snarl that means she's afraid, but her sister pats her arm soothingly. “Don't worry, honey-honey, it will be better this time. I know what I'm doing and I'm not scared the way I was before. Last time I was trying to be Weetzie and fix everybody. Now I am myself, and my magic is my own, and I can do a little bit with the tambourine, but a lot with Grandma Fifi's old Singer Sphinx.” To demonstrate, Cherokee pulls out her own hooves first: not heavy, hairy boots this time, but long slinky gloves with the fingers divided in two like tabi socks and a texture like mouse fur and glittering tips. “See?” She grins.

Raphael's haunches are a pair of jeans, just like the last ones, but the hair is a long stripe down each outer seam instead of covering everything. Angel Juan's horns curl on the hood of a mole-man sweatshirt, part of an appliqued pattern that makes the hood seem like a warrior's helm. “And this one's for Witch Baby,” Cherokee concludes. 

It's a jacket, black leather with patches of iridescent dragon-scale sequins on the arms and across the chest like armor. Cherokee has stitched white feather shapes like wings on the back, with little downy puffs of real feathers near the shoulders. There are two loops on one side that could hold Lily's favorite drumsticks. The zipper pull is a tiny snail shell encased in resin. Lily smiles her shy, cat smile and pulls on her sister's gift. It feels cooler than it looks (there are panels of mesh hidden along the sides and under the arms, to help the leather breathe,) and lighter, but there is still a solidness to it, like armor. Lily pulls up the zipper and ducks into the bathroom to look at herself. In the mirror, a small crowd of ghosts swirls around her, patting her hands and face and smiling.


	16. Another Secret Agent

The other Goat Guys put their costumes away, but Lily wears hers to the tower on the night of Darcy's party. “That’s totally your superhero outfit,” Darcy tells her, grinning. “And you need, like, a steampunk fedora with a viewfinder monocle and the camera and the flash built in.” 

“Oooh!” Cherokee cries and pulls her little sketchbook out of the pocket she hid in her sundress.

The guy members of the Goat Guys are shyer, meeting Darcy and Pepper Pots and the Scarlet Witch and Captain America and Falcon. Bucky stands stiff and awkward next to Steve and gives everyone a sharp nod, then melts back toward the Introvert Chair. Hawkeye introduces himself as “Clint Barton – I'm kind of a gofer for Darcy, some days,” which makes Darcy giggle and Steve look sideways at him. Sam and Raphael nod at each other like two dark spruce trees in a thicket of birches. Steve is delighted to learn that Raphael paints and leads him around Darcy's apartment, showing off his own work on the walls. After the fourth time both Wanda and Lily look up whenever someone says the word “Witch,” Lily's family does their best to remember to call her Lily.

Angel Juan does not seem like himself. He has combed his shaggy hair back in a James Dean pompadour, and his mustache looks wispy and uncertain. It is not until she looks closely that Lily realizes he has actually covered some of the hairs with concealer pencil. He looks very young and wide-eyed, and his English has gotten very correct, and when Lily introduces him as Angel Juan, he says, “You can call me A.J. if you want.” He does not touch Lily at all, and he and Bucky watch each other out of the sides of their eyes like two cats. Lily bites her lip and drums her fingers, watching and thinking.

The awkwardness doesn't last. Darcy and Pepper and Cherokee run off to a back room with one of Cherokee's enormous suitcases, talking Fashion. Raphael and Sam lean on the kitchen island, talking Ziggy Marley, and Steve listens earnestly. Angel Juan flirts elaborately with Wanda: “You should come to California, Brujita” he says, smiling his white panther smile, “And dig your toes in the sand and let the sun warm you up. We know how to make witch babies happy there.”

Lily’s camera clicks on Wanda, smiling up at Angel Juan like her soul is already making wedding plans. His arms are a dark blur; the camera will never focus entirely on Angel Juan. She gives a sideways smile and shrug at Bucky, who nods back and puts two fingers on the tiny bulge of the gris-gris under his shirt but doesn't uncoil from his chair. Hawkeye is perched on the back of a high bar stool he has scooted over from the kitchen island, frowning at Angel Juan and Wanda both with his arms crossed. Lily steps over to the archer. “You've met before, haven't you?” she says, just above a whisper, “You and Angel Juan.”

Barton looks at her with his mouth a little open and then somersaults backward off the chair with a loud, “Awww!” The chair falls forward with a thump. Once he's on his feet again he makes his rueful troll-doll face at her and whines, “Why do you gotta keep doing that, Bat? You're making me feel old and incompetent with your freaky mutant observational skills.”

Sam looks up. “Say what, now?”

Barton rolls his eyes. “Go ahead and share with the class, A.J.”

Angel Juan's smile gets wider and cockier. “Not all that much to tell, really,” he says, mostly to Lily, but he is playing his whole audience now. “I ran into a man I knew by the name of Bart Nathanson when I was working on a cruise ship in the Philippines, who let me know he was willing to pay for certain kinds of information. We did a thing or two on that trip and he let me know some other people to talk to in other places, times I happened to need a little extra work. I was never, like a full agent or anything.”

“You would've been,” Barton says seriously, “in another year or two. I had plans for you, kid.”

Angel Juan waves two fingers like a very sloppy salute. “S'cool. Hey, man, I'm glad you survived that whole thing that happened.”

“You mean the Hydra thing? Likewise. Where were you, anyway? You run into any trouble?”

Angel Juan looks three inches taller, and his accent has left Speech class and headed back to the barrio. “Nah. Monaco. And it's not like anyone had real high expectations of me, y'know? I finished out my assignment and went on back to LA for a while. Just, when the new guy showed up at the drop point, the data they got from me got a lot shittier.” Angel Juan winks elaborately and Barton smiles a real smile in return: a wicked grin. 

A moment later his face goes slack again and his hands drop to his side. “Wait, Monaco? Aw hell. You were Johnny, weren't you? The Johnny that got Kamkar out in time! Dude!” He offers Angel Juan a fist bump. Lily lets herself drift back to the corner and folds up on the floor next to the Introvert Chair. Learning this about Angel Juan makes her feel so many different things in such rapid succession that she is dizzy with it. The idea fits him so well she is a little ashamed not to have had it before. She leans against Bucky’s knee and feels a hand squeeze her shoulder through the leather of her new jacket.

Angel Juan grins back at Barton. “I wasn't gonna use that cover anyway; the cruise ship circuit seriously blows camels, man.”

Hawkeye is briefly serious. “No, really. I owe you for that one. I’m gonna give you a couple of phone numbers and talk to a couple of people. If – _when_ – a guy called Phil or a woman called Melinda reaches out to you, I hope you’ll at least hear them out. And…” and he’s back in goofball mode, “I’ll stop trying to scare you off Wanda. If you can be with Miss Radar over there for ten years and she only just now figures out you’re a spy, I figure you can handle the shit Wanda will put you through.” Barton reaches over and tweaks Wanda’s ribs , and she giggles and brushes her hair behind her ear.

Another piece falls into place for Lily. “That’s why he knew who I was, that first day in the tree,” she murmurs to herself. “He’s not a Loverman Films buff; he knew me from Angel Juan’s background file. Lanky lizards!”

“You mad at him?” Bucky’s voice is a soft rasp like the sweep of a broom, and his fingers stroke the maribou puffs at the base of one of Lily’s embroidered wings.

Lily shakes her head a little against his knee. “More… ashamed. I feel like a brat bath mat: Angel Juan and everybody’s been doing all this stuff this whole time, while I’ve been… cutting out newspaper articles and signing petitions.”

Bucky’s stroking fingers move to Lily’s black lamb curls. “Yeah, maybe,” he says, “but a lot of us tough guys, we never had that to lose. If I’d had a haven like the one you grew up in, I never coulda stepped away.” He strokes her hair a little longer, and then seems to give himself a shake. He plucks Lily’s drumsticks from their loops and raises his voice to the room. “You brought your sticks and your band, Lil, you gonna give us a little music tonight?”

So that’s how the Darcy party ends: with a long karaoke jam session. Lily drums on an empty cardboard box, an overturned soup pot, and a wine glass. Cherokee plays spoons, rather than tambourine. Raphael borrows Clint’s guitar, Darcy scares up a second one from the labs somewhere for Angel Juan, and they play. They play old Goat Guys songs like “Tijuana Surf,” and they play sing-alongs like “I’ll Be Your Baby Tonight,” and “Shenandoah,” and (because Steve and Bucky ask,) “Molly Malone.” They play backup when Darcy announces, “This one’s for Than-Ass,” and breaks into Lily Allen’s “Fuck You.” Clint grabs his guitar back and does all of “Alice’s Restaurant” in an exaggerated Okie twang while Steve and Bucky and Darcy fall apart laughing. Angel Juan and Raphael team up for a slow, hushed version of “Gracias a la Vida,” with Angel Juan singing the words in Spanish and Raphael echoing him in spoken English, and Pepper cries on Darcy’s shoulder. They play. The songs are panthers, biting back the dark.

The next day, all the remaining Avengers disappear from the tower, Mallard and Meadows take a cab to the airport, and the Goat Guys walk up to Fred Za’s studio on the eighth floor of the building on Meat Street to work on turning their music into magic.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> TBH I always had trouble with Angel Juan in the books. But the idea of Spy!AJ made a whole lot of things make more sense, somehow.


	17. Waiting for Thanos

The first part of the war is boring. The Goat Guys rehearse. Abuelita’s daughter runs the store while her mother joins the discreet horde of magic workers burying charms and painting invisible circles in certain parts of Central Park and the surrounding streets. A few of the sneakiest and most charismatic souls work their way into City Hall and the 911 dispatch center, altering the dates on permits and a few priority matrices to make certain that the law will not interfere with the great gathering when it happens. (Some of these sneaks run afoul of Daredevil, which is a pity, but not unexpected; they do their best to give him information that will get him pointed in the right direction again.) Lily’s email is full of schedules and sketch maps as if it were a music festival or a street fair they were planning, not a battle. Bucky sends a text message from wherever he is that reads: _Default toothpaste flavor here is clove. How do you feel about emigration?_ Later on a second one says, _A lot of the women here shave their heads. I take back what I said the time we talked about it._ Lily concludes that the Avengers are probably in Wakanda and tells Bucky, _August in New York is like being pickled in honey. I miss the Santa Anas and smog that smells like fire instead of garbage._ When someone calls Lily for help with ghosts, she no longer asks the spirits if they want to go on, but if they want to stay and fight. The Goat Guys rehearse. Lily and Angel Juan rent a carpet cleaner on the Mallard and Meadows business account and go to work on the living room, making everything even hotter and damper, but refreshing the woven-in wards and clearing out the detritus of a year’s worth of tiny, irrelevant spells. The Goat Guys rehearse. A glass raindrop that hangs over the dining table bursts into shimmering dust, screaming wordlessly that the Sorcerer Supreme is dead and the Titan is on his way. It is time to move.

%%%%%%%%%%%

It’s the feast of O Bon; an appropriate time for a death lover to show up, if he were to show up in Japan rather than Wakanda, but then, when is not an appropriate time? Earth is full of death, if you are looking. Central Park in the afternoon is full of people and dogs panting in the heat. Lily Witch Baby Wigg Loverman Bat finds a place where she can hear the tinkling, warbling sound of the Jamaican steel drum band through one ear and the deep thrumming boom of the Taiko drums from the festival in the other. She sets up her two deep, narrow conga drums and the rack that holds the sharp little bongos. No sticks for her, not today. She needs direct contact between the drums and her body. She is empty with dread and her heart thumps as fast as the crickets shrilling under the leaves. But she is here.

Angel Juan sets up his bass directly behind her and Cherokee and Raphael flank him. “No vamping,” Angel Juan warns Raphael as they tune, “and follow Baby’s lead. This is deep bruja stuff today.” Cherokee rattles her tambourine like a shiver of cold wind across their necks. Lily pulls her feet out of her boots and wriggles her curly toes into the prickly grass. She listens to the drums at her left and at her right until she can hear the bridge between them, and then she begins to play. A moment later, Angel Juan’s bass comes in with the rocking-horse salsa riff of the Witch Baby Wiggle, one of the first songs they wrote together, before the Goat Guys, before the first time the Perez family got deported, when the world and Witch Baby’s power were new. Raph’s guitar and Kee’s tambourine join them, and then the Goat Guys are tight, playing like one eight-handed demigod, and there is nothing in Lily’s mind but the music and the spirits.

Fred Za and his other apprentices nod at the Goat Guys as they stride past them to set up their drum circle on the other side of the Taiko stage, just barely within earshot.

There’s an African Dance troupe with drummers setting up an impromptu performance on the lawn, just barely out of earshot. Maisie Freedman, of the Silver Belles, smiles and thinks of the continuity of jazz and starts to teach a third-grade class from PS 195, all of them in borrowed tap shoes, how to do the Shim-Sham Shimmy.

From inside the old shed he and his buddies have taken over as their squat, Thomas Builds-the-Fire hears the kids laughing and clomping feet in the distance. He can just make out the beat. After a few seconds, he upends a stewpot and starts drumming along.

Matt Murdock, Esquire, cocks his head, distracted from his interview with a hedge fund manager he suspects of actually being a loan shark, by something coming from the direction of Central Park. It’s a quarter mile away and blurred by all the sounds of the daytime city, but Matt has the impression of a wave washing up, a little further each time. By the time the sun is setting and Daredevil takes to the roofs, it’s unmistakable. And strange. Central Park, the whole thing, has become a giant drum. Matt shakes his head. New York always has weird shit going on. Hell’s Kitchen still needs him. As the first night breeze starts to rise from the river he hears an electronic chiming sound from almost every direction at once. All the TVs that had been playing at this late hour suddenly broadcast the same message: _Hey, Fellow Earthlings! This is Princess Shuri of Wakanda. The fate of our world hangs on the outcome of the battle that is going on right now, and I am asking those of you who are awake to bear witness._ Daredevil heads for Foggy’s apartment.

Witch Baby’s hands throb and her shoulders ache, distantly, somewhere else. A voice that used to be hers sings along with her sister and brothers about love like a Joshua tree, growing in sacred ground. She is standing in front of a throng of spirits, and she is asking for their help.

It’s late afternoon in Paris. Mr. Meadows bows politely to the assembled shades in a square that once housed a guillotine. “If you would care to join us in saving the earth,” he tells them, “Mallard and I will help you get there.”


	18. Special Spectral Spectacle

Lily drums and drums. She is a gate. She is a bridge. She is a tree: her roots in Angel Juan’s and Raphael's guitar strings and her branches reaching out to a whole ghost-a-rama firefly swarm. She knows nothing of what is happening in Wakanda, where the heroes face the Titan. She knows the world that the lingering spirits love enough to cling to beyond their time: sparrows, daisies, kimchee, the smell of parsley, a sharp pang of guilt over a broken clock, a glowy warm protectiveness for a knob-kneed teenager who is now turning fifty. The dead that stay behind are passionate; are nothing but passion. They will fight as only they can. When the Titan decided to court a queen, did he never once consider the opinion of her people?

Lily answers their passion with passion. The passers-by in Central Park can hear a quartet of musicians singing a funky salsa version of “Rag Mop,” if they care to listen. The ghosts hear Witch Baby pleading, _Help me. Help me for corn tortillas and jacaranda flowers, for Bucky who can be happy about clove toothpaste even as he prepares for war. Help me for Jerry Lee Lewis, mole-man hoodies, and ducks. Help me for Steve and Wanda and other dangerous angels._ All around Central Park, while the drums and hearts beat in heavy waves, the magicians and the psychics and the mediums call out to the dead of New York, inviting them through a gate that is not the gate to the afterworld, but the gate to this one: to one time and place where every willing soul is needed.

The dead do not measure distance the same way the living do. They move along roads of emotion and association. The soldiers who fought the Hulk have come to the gathering point at Central Park, but so has Jessie Braceros, who got to go see _Hamilton_ on Broadway a few weeks before the lymphoma took her and loved it more than anything. So does Loki of Asgard, crackling green and spitting with rage, returning to the site of his most humiliating defeat at the head of a small army of shades of drug dealers, pimps, and assorted other hellraisers. “We are no one’s courting gift!,” he shouts, “We will not allow ourselves to be _used_ like this!” and his irregulars roar their agreement as they pour themselves through the portal that Clea holds open. 

So does one more spirit: one that makes Witch Baby bite back a sob when she sees him, because of what it means for wherever the real battle is happening. Some of the shyer, more reluctant ghosts are thrilled, though. The blue shape, edged with gold, calls, _Who’s with me?_ And a fresh squadron of ghosts cheer and fly through the portal behind Captain America.

The dead do not have the power the living do. The strongest spirit can move only a pound or two of weight, or change the temperature of the air, or the thoughts in a mind. Against a creature they have no kinship with, they can do less than that. And yet the spirits pour onto the battlefield in Wakanda until the sun glows blue, and they change that most insubstantial of things, luck. Projectiles fly truer. The ground under Thanos’ feet becomes less steady. A few of the combatants, the ones who have spent some time in the borderlands, their own hearts unbeating, can see the throng that pours through Clea’s portal. The Winter Soldier finds himself in the center of an army for the first time: not deep in enemy territory, not hidden in the trees, but a part of an unstoppable surge. He pulls himself out of the stunned blankness of seeing his mission complete (end of the line), sweeps up the shield from where it has fallen, and sends it with a sniper’s perfect aim and pinpoint timing to stike Thanos edge-on across the eyes. Even this cannot harm the Titan, but it can distract him just long enough. The ghosts loose Thunderstrike’s handle from Thor’s hand, just enough so that it lands, not in the Titan’s chest, but in his skull. Thanos falls.

“The Gauntlet!” someone shouts, “Get the Gauntlet off him!” Thor and Wanda race to the prone giant. Thor calls a lightning strike to Thanos’ elbow and Wanda pushes at the flesh on either side of it until the limb is severed. Bucky drags the Gauntlet away as Thanos twitches into wakefulness and tries to stand. Wanda places her hands on the Time and the Space Stones. There is a moment where the world goes silent and blank. Thanos is gone. The sun burns yellow again.

Wanda swipes at the blood that trickles from her upper lip. “I sent him five billion years into the future,” she says, “and to the edge of a black hole, where time will stand still for him.” And then she faints.

%%%%%%%%%%%%

Lily drums and drums. She is a gate. She is a bridge. She is a memory in the hearts of a handful of ghosts. She knows nothing of what is happening in Wakanda, where the heroes face the Titan. She drums until she can’t anymore. She drums until something vast and burning roars back up the road the dead have been taking and strikes her like a bomb blast, leaving her gasping, with every bone and muscle aching. The skins on all four of her drums pop like balloons. She blinks into awareness again to find herself leaning back against Angel Juan, his arms under her elbows, the bridge and frets of his bass pressed into her back where she leans. She gets her feet under her and stands. All around her, the Park is going quieter as the other musicians wind down and murmur to each other. Lily looks at the tired, worried faces of the Goat Guys, and says, “Thanks.” 

Cherokee, hands at her sides, gives her tambourine one last shivery, silvery shake, one last cool goosebump wind in the muggy summer night. “You were so ace,” she tells Lily as she wraps her arms around her in a hug, “you magic slink drum-love!” Raphael and Angel Juan clap their hands on her shoulders. “You’re a kick-ass _bruja,_ ” Angel Juan tells her. Lily stands and breathes and feels her hands wet and stinging. The others get their instruments put away, nestle her poor drums back in their cases. Fred Za comes back down the path, his own drum still intact and slung on his back. He, too, puts a hand on Lily’s shoulder for a moment. “Well done,” he says. “Go to Clea.”


	19. Clea Explains

The strange house that no longer contains Dr. Strange is more visible than usual today, at the edge of the park. Light streams out from all the windows and the open door, where Clea stands. A long line snakes from the doorway down the path into the park, where it spills into a delta: slump-shouldered musicians, tarot readers, curanderos, psychics, palmists and more: half the magicians in New York, it seems like. Lily and the Goat Guys shuffle into the line and inch their way up the path. “Witch Baby,” Cherokee asks after a moment, “What’s that on your face?” When Lily just blinks at her, Cherokee pulls out her phone and clicks the camera. She shows her sister a screen of her own face, wincing and pale, with an amber glow in the center of her forehead. Lily puts her own finger there, carefully, and feels a smooth bead, a triangle about the size of a tooth, with rounded edges. She shakes her head. Maybe Clea will know.

When the Goat Guys make their way to the door of the Sanctum, Clea pours them each a glass of water from a glistening white pitcher. They have seen the other magicians ahead of them in line take their water, bow and leave. Lily feels her throat unparch as the cool, lavender-flavored water goes down. Her eyebrows unpucker, her hands unsting. She hands the glass back to Clea’s assistant, a short figure covered in a hooded cloak, and is ready to leave. “Please come in,” Clea says, “And have a seat. I’ll be with you shortly, if you don’t mind waiting.”

The room they come to reminds Lily of Mallard and Meadows’ living room, with the soft carpets and the old-looking furniture. Instead of gypsy caravan draperies, there are carved beams at the ceiling and the corners. Cherokee settles in the middle of a curly-armed couch, with Lily and Raphael squished in on either side of her. Angel Juan, after a moment, settles on the floor at Lily’s feet, leaning back against her. Lily taps her fingers along his shoulder, in the rhythm of “Yellow-dog Dingo.” She is tired. She is wired; if Bucky were here she’d pull up “Flat Foot Floogie” on her Starkpad and dance until her feet were as sore as her hands were before Clea gave her the water. She waits.

Clea glides into the room: it could be a short while or a long while later; time inside the Sanctum is uncertain. Clea smiles at Lily and the Goat Guys and bends gracefully over Lily and touches her forehead gently with cool fingers. “Thank you for waiting,” she says in her chiming voice. “And thank you very much, Lily Witch Baby Wigg Loverman Bat, for turning the tide in the battle with Thanos. We could not have prevailed without you.”

This is how the Goat Guys know that they prevailed. Raphael does a quiet victory fist pump and Cherokee slumps against him in relief. Lily is confused. She’s less powerful than Fred Za or Mr. Mallard or Mr. Meadows or a hundred other magicians who worked tonight. She’s a drop in an important bucket, but why does that mean Clea has brought her into the Sanctum? “Um,” says Lily, “Me? Why?”

Clea laughs, “I should tell you to use your intelligence and figure it out, my dear, but I know you are tired.” Clea herself must be exhausted, but she she shows no sign of it. “It is very simple. The ghosts travel on roads of emotion. And you, Lily, care. You love the ghosts, and you love New York. You care about Wanda, and Tony, and the other Avengers. You love James. Your love was the road that carried the dead to Wakanda.”

Lily drums her fingers a little too hard against Angel Juan’s shoulder. She wasn’t ready for that love to be important. Being one drop in a bucket was enough. Her family was enough. Mallard and Meadows, and Fred Za, and being one of Darcy’s people, was enough. She had had Angel Juan; she didn’t deserve… _Clear your mind of the idea of deserving, and you will have begun to think._ “Oh,” she says.

Clea smiles and taps Lily’s forehead again. “That is why the Soul Stone marked you, I think.” 

Lily rubs the place Clea touched, feeling that little amber-colored bead again. “If you explained that to me now, would I understand it?”

“The Soul Stone is itself one of the least understood of the Infinity Gems. What we do know: it requires a great sacrifice to manifest, and Thanos, who made the sacrifice this time, was its wielder. We could not simply wrest it away, as we could with the other stones. When Wanda sent Thanos into the future, the Soul Stone demanifested. Whether it followed him or did something else we don’t know, but it took the paths of the dead to go where it was going, and some of us, it touched. What that means for you, now, is a matter that can wait.” 

Lily nods gratefully. “I want to go home,” she says, thinking of her little room in Mallard and Meadows’ apartment, set impossibly into the middle of the canyons of San Bernadino County, with maybe Darcy’s floor of the tower somewhere nearby. 

Clea rubs her hands tiredly. “I’ll call you a cab.”


	20. Next Day

New York mostly doesn’t quite know what to make of the Battle of Wakanda. The magnitude of what Thanos could have been doesn’t register, of course, and the blows Wakanda as a nation took in the battle get the same deep, but not limitless, sympathy as any other disaster not immediately connected to New York. The death of young King T’Challa creates a flurry of agitation on Wall Street, as investors try to guess whether his successor will continue his policies of opening Wakanda to the world or will bring the barriers up again. But in New York, this is secondary to the death of Captain America. The TVs show old interviews and footage of the battle with Thanos and the Battle of New York. TCM shows back to back Captain America Movies, History Channel shows back to back Captain America documentaries (except for the Ken Burns one – you have to go to PBS for that.) Food Network shows the Avengers themed episode of Cake Wars. Hand-painted bedsheet banners hang from windows and balconies. The people who wear t-shirts are wearing ones with the shield design if they have one, or blue if they don’t. The street hawkers have painted black bars across the center of the shields they're selling, like the bands the cops wear on their badges when they lose an officer. The crowds mill and murmur in a different pattern than they do on ordinary days. 

The carpet-padded apartment on Meat Street is too quiet, even with the radio going, the air too close, the space too small. Witch Baby and Angel Juan hug Cherokee and Raphael goodbye and watch them get in a cab to the airport. Darcy wants Lily at the tower, but has not invited Angel Juan. She could push it, but he tells her not to bother; walks her partway and then melts down the subway, telling her, “Call if you need me.” He won't be staying at Mallard and Meadows' that night, she knows, and she doesn't know what he'll do instead. He won't tell her, either. Angel Juan has always had his pride and his secrets. 

Lily walks, driven by the restless hum of magic under her skin. Some days she hates the crowds in Manhattan, hates them like blowing sand on a cold day at the beach, but today they are the saltwater tide that she surfs on, their motion keeping her upright no matter how far down the ground beneath her feet has dropped. Ghosts swirl around her – far fewer of them than usual. Most of them simply nod or wave their greetings. The dead do not have the same priorities as the living, and the ones who did not go to fight are the ones who simply go on doing what they do. Most of them. Three wispy presences bob around Lily like clouds of gnats at sunset, keeping pace with her. One of them whistles “Rag Mop.” One of them has a shape like a round head and a round belly and thinks with a Czech accent. One of them Lily doesn’t recognize at all. _We like you,_ that one says. _We’re going to help you from here on out._

Lily nods back at them. She adds this to the large pile of New Things sitting there in the middle of her mind, along with the stone in the center of her forehead (she has pulled her newsie cap down to hide it) and the love Clea told her was enough to build a road from here to Wakanda. How could it be that, when it’s so new? It’s so new and it’s so different from the last time she fell in love. No butterflies, no pink car wishes. Just… trust, an ease with the hard questions, and Lily would be happy to do that with almost anyone. Just… bandwidth. Lily's thoughts keep time with her hurrying feet, going in spirals. When your love is a road ten thousand ghosts and part of a soul stone travel on, does that wear it out, or does it trample the road broader and deeper? _Relax, Babycakes,_ says the ghost of Charlie Bat, come back from who knows where. Right. He always could read her mind. _The best we can do sometimes is make wherever we’re lost in look as much like home as we can._

%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%

At the tower, the front desk hands her a guest badge and the elevator takes her all the way to the Avengers’ Common Room, which is, of course, completely devoid of Avengers. The ones that are coming back are doing so in a few days. In the meanwhile, Darcy has taken over this space for those that know the team well enough to call them by their first names. She hugs Lily fiercely, waves at a spread of little sandwiches and dipping vegetables and things set up on one long table, and then seems to forget her.

Darcy mourns hot, the power of her grief and rage propelling her around the room in rapid steps and spinning her mind faster yet. She has thrown herself into her PR work headlong, pulling photographs and monitoring press chatter and liaising with the press and the small army of people planning memorials for the fallen. She has never looked more like a Stark. Letters of blue light float on every window and on the tv screen and in a beam of light in the middle of the room. Darcy strides from one to the next, adding things as she goes. A thin woman in shabby clothes that Lily doesn’t recognize until Darcy calls her Jane works more slowly and steadily, organizing individual lists and occasionally putting a sandwich or a piece of fruit in one of Darcy’s waving hands. “She used to do this for me,” Jane says. Lily feels tall and awkward and guilty. Why is she here? What good can she do? She is the newest of Darcy’s many friends and she doesn’t know how close they are, really. And Lily doesn't even know if she properly appreciates what she has been given. How bad is it, for Darcy, that Lily’s Bucky is alive, and Darcy’s Steve is dead?

Steve, who is, Darcy says, already disappearing behind Captain America again, and she is so angry with him for letting that happen. “He loved me, but I don’t think I was ever really real to him,” she says at one point. “I was going to be the Ever After at the end of the story, but the story was never going to end – as soon as he was needed elsewhere it’s like I disappeared. And it’s – Jesus, it’s not like I’m going to stop him from saving the world, but...” Lily pats her back and Jane hands her a limp blue bandanna blow her nose on. “He was… such a good guy, and we just – we just used him up,” Darcy whispers. “Put him on the front lines every time, never let him have any of the good things he was supposedly defending, he never let _himself_ enjoy anything he could have… I… I kind of hope Peggy was there to meet him when he went.”

“Not exactly,” Lily says without thinking. When Darcy blinks at her, she drums her fingers on the arm of the couch. “Steve… I - the spirit world- sent… people against Thanos, too,” Lily explains, “and I helped hold the road open between New York and Wakanda. Well, me, and a bunch of other people, but. Steve was the only one who traveled that road both ways. From the place he died to the place he loved, and then back again, with a bunch of other spirits gathered around him, to keep fighting where they could. So I… I saw him, more clearly than some of the others. Because of that, and because he was. Clear. It wasn’t like… maybe Peggy was there, maybe she wasn’t. She could have been. But he wasn’t… it wasn’t that he could be with her, it was that the wound of losing Peggy was healed. He was… whole. Angry, still. Steve was always angry, but whole.” Darcy sobs and leans on Jane, who wraps her in a thin-armed hug and steers her to the couch. Lily’s phone buzzes.

**Silent Bob:** _How are you holding up? Have you eaten anything yet today?_

**Me:** _OK so far, yes, and how many people have asked you that?_

**Silent Bob:** _Too damn many ;) And your answers are mine, in case you wondered_.

**Me:** _New question – WHY are you holding up? Do you actually need to right now?_

Pepper Potts drifts into the room, wearing a chenille sweater, no makeup, and no shoes. She piles up a plate for herself and Lily moves from the couch to one of the other chairs so she can sit next to her almost-stepdaughter. “Betty’s on her way,” Pepper tells Darcy, “and she says she’ll reach out to a few of the other Culver people who might want to speak at Bruce’s memorial. We’re still fighting Washington a little on including him in the State funeral for Steve and Rhody, but some of Ross’s more… excessive … objections were on-camera and the public opinion seems to be moving the way we want it to right now. And the Skype meeting between Calvin and Rocket happened.”

“Oh,” Darcy has stopped sobbing. Pepper has produced a brush from somewhere and Jane is brushing Darcy's hair. “Yeah. God. How did that go?”

Pepper smiles. “Pretty well, by all accounts. Cal was able to tone down his enthusiasm for Klepto Cyborg Raccoons from Space and was surprisingly empathetic about Rocket’s situation. And we’re still not sure whether Rocket can talk directly with Hobbes but Calvin was optimistic about being able to work something out.”

Darcy lets out a long, breathless, “Ohhh,” and leans back on the couch.

Lily clears her throat. This sounds secret. “Is this something I'm allowed to know about?”

Pepper looks at her coolly and waggles her head a little. “One of our allies lost most of his family in the fight that ended yesterday. We’re trying to help him out. And in return, perhaps he will help us retrieve Tony from…” Pepper waves a hand vaguely upward, “or at least find out what happened to him.”

“So you don’t know either,” says Lily, thinking, _Wow, Darcy’s luck is the clutchiest. Boyfriend and Bio-dad too._ She wonders where Darcy’s real family is, the ones who raised her. Darcy’s never said.

Pepper bites savagely into a mini ham-and-cheese croissant and glowers as she chews. “I have said goodbye to Tony _so many fu- frigging times._ It’s actually spelled out in his contract: lines of succession, contingency plans, how many years to wait before declaring him officially dead, what terms to re-hire him on if he comes back after that….”

Darcy cackles. “Oh, god, that would be just like him. He’ll find a wormhole somewhere and come back, like, 100 years in the future and turn himself inside out trying to be a better time-travel hero than S-steve….” 

Her laughter sounds wet, and Pepper rubs her back. “Go to bed, honey.” Lily takes her leave, too. If she's the same kind of genie as Dirk's great-grandfather, she might still be around in a hundred years. If Tony really does show up then, maybe the ghosts can tell her and she can… do something.

**Silent Bob:** _Hi, Lily, this is actually Sam. Bucky’s not really in a position to thank you for that last text right now so I’m doing it. Thank you, he needed that. I hope you really do stick around; I can use all the help I can get trying to get these poor assholes to let go a little now and then._


	21. Something Like Forgiveness

Angel Juan agrees to meet her for dinner at Sylvia’s. They've never eaten there together before, but they both like it. The restaurant is as crowded and noisy as ever, but the food and the coffee taste perfect like they always do. Lily's ghosts are quiet, but she thinks in her head about the crunch and melt of fried catfish, the salty tang of collard greens, the pudding-silky feel of sweet potato pie, knowing that Charlie Bat, at least, can read her mind and enjoy her meal with her that way. A part of Lily, or maybe it's one of the ghosts, puts a picture in her head about how she and Angel Juan look from outside themselves. They could be twins, in brown and white. Both the same height, both wearing jeans and tee shirts, with bandannas tied over their hair. Both with spines coiled inward a little from hunching over their instruments all the time. Sometimes he remembers to call her Lily. Sometimes she remembers to call him AJ. Angel Juan carves rose shapes out of his own sweet potato pie, with deft little flickers of his spoon. “So,” he says. “You and the Winter Soldier.”

Lily spreads her hands. “I guess. I mean, we haven’t even kissed yet. I wasn’t trying to… I wasn’t flirting, or anything.”

Angel Juan’s white teeth flash and are hidden again. “I know that, Niña. You never did flirt, even with me. You can’t. You don’t have the middle gears.”

“I feel like I messed something up, though. With us. I should have just let you come with me to New York. Or come with you to wherever you were going next. Found a research grant or something. This whole thing’s been kind of clutch for you.”

Angel Juan smiles sadly and shakes his head. “Baby Lamb, I love you, and we could have been good together, but I’m not mad at you, and I don’t think you’re making a mistake.”

“Really?”

Angel Juan reaches over and digs his spoon into Lily’s grits, having finished his own already. “Really,” he says. “If it was you and me, we’d be playing music, yeah? Calling ourselves Witch Baby and Panther Boy or something. Maybe we’d just be starting to hit it big, opening for some bigger act, sleeping on buses, seeing the world one shitty backstage at a time. I’d work the contracts but you’d keep our money and make sure I didn’t do anything too crazy, and I’d pull you out of your shell, and then one night while we were setting up our gear, a great big purple _pendejo_ from space would land in a country we’ve barely heard of and snap his fingers, and you and me, we’d crumple into dust like most of the rest of the world.”

Lily twists her hands and takes a drink of cold coffee. “You know that for a fact?”

Angel Juan smiles a real smile: a sweet, melting-butter smile, his eyes all soft. “That’s what Wanda says. And you are a beautiful magic slink, Niña, but she knows things.” Lily wonders when Angel Juan talked to Wanda about this. But Lily knows that look on his face, and she knows now Wanda will have a speedy panther boy, always moving too fast to pin down, but ready to hold her steady in his strong brother grip, and Lily can’t even be angry.

Angel Juan straightens up and gives her his Elvis wink. “But look what we got instead! You’re a kickin’ genie bruja who helped save the world, with a pounceable boyfriend who might go on secret missions sometimes, but will never, ever lie to you. Wanda wouldn’t say what else, but she says you and me, we both got _amazing_ stuff coming.” He leans across the table and squeezes Lily’s shoulder with one hand. “Bite back the dark, panther girl. I’ll be around when you need me, I’ll call if I need you, it’ll all be fine.”

She wants to believe him, Lily decides. _Let's go on as if the answer is yes._ Aloud, what she says is, “So. You and the Scarlet Witch, huh?”

%%%%%%%%%%%%%

AJ walks her through the thickening dusk to the subway, then melts away again. When Lily emerges a few blocks from Meat Street, the sky has gone velvet black. The air is soft and full of nightlife smells: fried food, beer, perfume, marijuana in a few places. The sidewalk rumbles with the underground trains and thumps with the beat of the dance clubs. Lily's ghosts pull in tight around her, keeping watch for danger in the crowds. Lily thumps up the stairs to Mallard and Meadows' place and cranks open a window to let in the air and the sounds of people being alive, then closes it again so the just-washed woolite smell of all those heirloom carpets doesn't get replaced with car exhaust too soon. The answering machine light on the landline blinks. Lily takes a shower and pulls on her most comfortable clothes that will still work if she needs to go ghost-hunting, gives herself a shake to let her coffee nerves settle, and pulls out the notepad to take down phone numbers.

The robot voice of the phone says, calmly, “August… sixteenth, at… Three… forty-one… p.m… from… Martin Mallard.” Lily sits up straighter and starts scribbling.

There is a harsh breathing sound, and then the thin, oboe voice of Merlin Meadows: “Hello, Lily dear. I'm sorry if I've caught you while you were sleeping, or busy. I'm calling the landline because I have that number memorized... I realize matters are probably a bit unsettled in New York right now and I'm not certain I've gotten the time zone shift right. Please just call me back whenever you get this, please… I- I'll most likely be awake. It's- it's Mart- I'm afraid it's Mallard. He collapsed yesterday in the aftermath of our Great Work and now he's in hospital. The doctors are calling it a stroke and they… oh, god, they don't think he's going to wake up. Our friend Eugenie that we were staying with is trying to help and everybody is very kind, but… there are all these forms and things, and Martin's French was always better than mine and… I'm sorry Lily, I don't like to fuss, but I really do need our Apprentice here as soon as you can manage it. I'll – I'll get Eugenie to call and give you the hospital phone number and directions to her flat and such. Just… thank you, dearest. I'm sure it will work out somehow.” The message after that is an old woman, speaking English very slowly and clearly with a thick French accent, with directions and instructions. The cliff is always steeper than you think it is, Lily thinks. Already the misfortunes are refusing to stay stuck to the walls.

%%%%%%%%%%%

_Bucky is alive and Stevie is dead. He has known this day was coming since 1928, if not sooner, but it is still a surprise; still a weird, silent, hollow space that muffles every sound he hears and blurs every color he sees. The surviving Avengers and the SI people are united in telling him that he doesn’t need to do this. Other people are handling the logistics; they can send someone over to the facility in Paris where Mallard is dying to handle paperwork. Bucky doesn’t have to do anything but mourn, or he can help Darcy and Hal Koenig with the memorial planning, if he wants to. If he feels up to it. He goes to Paris anyway._

_The Institut Curie is clean and quiet and sterile, like a corporate hotel, with long corridors painted in soft colors. He spots Lily and Meadows in one of those hallways, moving from a cafeteria back toward the place where Mallard lies. Meadows rests his hand on Lil’s elbow with absent-minded trust. Lil steps like a heron, placing each foot with care. She is much less used to guiding than Meadows is to being guided. When Bucky jogs up to them, her first words to him are, “you didn’t have to do this,” but then they are holding each other so tightly that he can feel her left eyelid flutter against his right cheekbone. And all his sorrow and her anxiety must be only human size, after all, small enough to be held in two pairs of circling arms._

_When Bucky demands, “fucking let me help you, Lil,” she doesn’t argue. Maybe she can hear the Winter Soldier howling behind the words._ Give me a mission. When the mission has been completed it stops hurting.

_“Our lists are running away from us,” she says instead. “Who to tell in the States, what kind of service to have, all the things in the Meat Street apartment and whether Meadows wants to stay there…”_

_“Duck soup,” Bucky promises, “Sergeants and lists go together like Fred and Ginger.”_

_Meadows gives him a tremulous smile. Lil starts to run a hand through her curls and stops when she hits the bandanna she has tied around her forehead over the Soul Stone fragment. Lil blinks her shadowed eyes, and Bucky thinks, purple. Bucky offers the old man his own left arm, drapes the other one over Lily’s shoulders. His flesh arm knows the feel of resting on thin bird bones. His body knows the feel of life buzzing through a frame that seems too small for it, held up against him. Stevie is dead, he is alive. The ground is solid under his feet._


	22. Epilogue: Los Dias de los Vivos

In later years, the only thing Bucky will be able to remember about the State Funeral in DC is the ridiculously long argument he had with Koenig and some army jackass beforehand about whether he would wear his uniform, and whether he would cut his hair. (He didn’t, on either count.) Philip Glass apparently composed a new sonata or something for the occasion, that shows up now and then in concerts or news programs. Bucky almost never recognizes it for what it is when he hears it, but he likes it OK. 

Lily spends three weeks helping Meadows close up the apartment on Meat Street and move into an assisted-living facility. Saying goodbye to Mallard has, oddly, reduced Meadows’ interest in the Beyond. Lily’s move-into-the-tower contract is a weird amalgam of rental agreement, hiring document, and prenup. She will offer counseling services, though not to Avengers. There are eight pages related to purchase and use of any photographs she takes. The Avengers still don’t think they need a ghost hunter, but there are pages about that, too, in case something comes up, and more agreements about training with Wanda and some of Strange’s people and developing her powers further. There are agreements about where she and Bucky fit into all this, and what happens if they don’t anymore. It’s a weird way to start dating someone, but Bucky finds he likes the way it’s all spelled out, thoughtfully. No hidden agendas or traps.

Wanda moves out; the Avengers are looking at branching out to both coasts, maybe liaising with the X-men. AJ Perez moves with her, with much less fuss.

When Bucky finally agrees to carry the shield on missions (though Sam gets dibs), it's Darcy who prevails on him to shave the beard. “Anything you can bring yourself to do that makes the world think 'Sergeant James Barnes, WWII hero,' you need to do that. We all know that's not all there is to you, but maybe think of it like a cover identity?” So he shaves, and Lily stays up with him the first weeks when leather-clad hands reach out for him in his dreams, trying to put the mask back on. She drums them away or dances with him or reads _The Just So Stories_ aloud. Bucky hears her say, “Oh Best Beloved,” and thinks about her genie gift for knowing what someone needs to hear. And then after that it's fine, except for the reporters still being pains in the ass.

“Look,” he explains for the umptieth time, “The shield is just a thing. Any of the Avengers who can lift it train with it at least sometimes, because any of us might have to, and I'd be delighted if we had more than one. And I don't really care if you call me Captain America or Winter Soldier or Sergeant Muttface. I care about doing what I can to make the world better – or _still here_ – now that I have a choice.” #Sgtmuttface trends on Twitter for two weeks after that and is then replaced by #kanyewtf, and then by #hulkwantspancakes. The media is much easier on the Hulk now that they know he’s not coming back.

The Avengers don’t need a ghost hunter very often, but some of the small-time heroes do. The ghost of an AIM goon tells Lily about a secret lab that’s being supplied by some traffickers that Daredevil is chasing down… Bucky kind of likes the guy, he decides. It’s the safer decision to make since it seems that Daredevil and Natalia maybe have a thing going.

Tony comes back. That poor mook from Queens he was so fond of doesn’t. Tony asks Lily to take him on as a patient. And maybe lab rat, if any more ghosts show up.

A year has gone by. And another six weeks after that.

%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%

New York is too cold in November to build the _ofrendas_ for the _Dias de los Muertos_ outdoors. Pepper has set lines of tables all around the biggest common room in the tower instead, piled with marigolds and flickering in the candlelight. Not all the photographs are of people who died in the Battle of Wakanda. Bruce and Steve and Rhodey and Peter are there, but so is Howard Stark, and Edwin Jarvis, and Brandy-Lynn Bat, and Dwayne Potts, and Rebecca Barnes. People come and go. Tony sits on a couch, leaning on Pepper, with his other arm around Darcy, who curls up against him with her legs tucked up underneath her. Rocket Raccoon is draped halfway across her lap, and she scratches his ears absently.

Bucky leaves a Coney Island hotdog and a small bag of horehound candy in front of Steve’s picture. It's one Lily snapped on a quiet day, while he frowned absently at his drawing pad. The photo is cropped to show only his head and shoulders; you could read all kinds of different emotions into his downturned profile beyond the concentration that was really there. Bucky nods at the four on the couch when they wave at him, but chooses instead to perch on the arm of the Introvert Chair that Lily occupies. 

There is silence. The candles flicker. “Y’know, it’s funny,” Bucky says after a while. “I thought I’d be worse off than I am. I mean, I miss the sonofabitch. I miss him like hell, but… it’s lighter than I expected. Steve doesn’t show up in my nightmares. There’s no- no guilt. I don’t feel like I owe him anything I wouldn’t do anyway… it’s… lighter.”

“Yeah,” Tony’s voice sounds creaky and rough. “I spent so much energy hating his guts, y’know? All that time growing up, trying to fight Howard’s memories and now… I can’t even get mad at Howard anymore. I wouldn’t exactly say I forgive him, either, it’s more like… why? What was all the fuss about?”

Mr. Meadows has been lurking near the kitchen island, nibbling almond cookies decorated like skulls. Los Dias have been quieter than usual this year, even for the ghost hunters. “We often don’t realize how much use the living make of the dead,” he says. “We call on them to protect us, to bear witness. We put our martyrs on tee shirts and posters and have them rally our troops. We burn our anger with them for fuel. But the spirits who joined us in fighting Thanos, they can’t be enslaved like that by anyone now. They are wholly free. All we have left of them are the parts of ourselves they helped make.”

Darcy digs her fingers into Rocket’s fur and sobs. She had imagined Steve's spirit still floating around her, watching over her, and this feels like losing him all over again. But Bucky snorts and says, “OK, now I’m jealous of him,” and Tony lets out a long, rolling laugh, and after a moment or two, Darcy chuckles, too.

“It does explain some of the PR numbers,” she says. “For all the memorial Facebook pages and the speeches and everything, the top search result right now for either of you is the one where you’re both murdering ‘Dear Officer Krupke’ at Sam’s birthday barbecue.” Everyone laughs.

Somewhere along the line, the gathering turns back into a party, with Sam and one of the new guys – Scott – giving each other shit, and music playing, and Tony and Rocket in a corner turning a pile of spare parts into a “satisfactory” imitation of Thing Addams. Lily and Bucky dance a little, and trade kisses that taste of cider and mulling spice. They hold each other in the brother grip that used to belong to Lily and AJ, outside arms wrapped around each other, inside hands clasped, but in the mirror image version: Lily on Bucky’s left side instead of AJ’s right. They head to the elevator, still trading kisses.

“I dunno how long this is going to last,” Bucky tells her, “before someone notices I’m getting away with more than I earned, and comes to take it away. But I’m sure as hell not going to worry about it until then.” His metal fingers tighten on Lily’s waist.

“Weetzie taught me,” Lily replies, “that happiness can’t be stolen. Any time it comes to you, it’s yours by right. No matter what you’ve done, no matter what other people are going through right then, no matter if you’re going to be sad later. That doesn’t mean you get to hurt other people for fun or anything, but happiness is always Finders Keepers.”

Bucky looks at her and she can see him thinking. His lips spread in a slow grin. “Guess I’m keeping you, then.”

**Author's Note:**

> Well, I had fun with that, guys, I hope you did too. I totally 100% believe in Genie/Superhero Witch Baby, so that was fun to write, and Spy!Angel Juan was a pleasant surprise. (I liked Witch Baby/Bucky, too, but they were hard to write because _neither of them wanted to talk.)_ I actually have quite a few outtakes and deleted scenes for this fic; would people be interested in those, or should I skip it? There's a lot more of Bucky and Lily, some of it M rated (some of it quite translatable to other ships and other fics and some.... not), and a discussion of how Nobody Get's Lily's References, and the Howling Commandos movie that Max never made and why he never made it. It's always the weird ones that take over my brain... Anyway, thanks for reading and always happy to hear from whomever.


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